Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

AI governance is a key enterprise concern. Organizations are assembling councils, publishing principles, rolling out “approved AI tools” lists, and asking employees to opt in to acceptable use policies. In most enterprises, however, the reality is that AI is already widely embedded in employees' daily work, often outside sanctioned channels and oversight. The visibility and control mechanisms needed to govern AI use are immature or nonexistent.

The browser has become the enterprise workspace. Employees, contractors, partners, and third parties use browsers to access SaaS applications, internal web apps, admin consoles, collaboration tools, and AI services from anywhere, often across a mix of managed, unmanaged, and personally owned devices. As they do, adversaries are increasingly targeting the browser session itself.

Prompt injection is among the defining security challenges of the AI era. As organizations move from chatbots to AI agents, adversaries are finding more ways to manipulate the language, context, and data these systems trust. With the rise of powerful AI agents that can crawl webpages, access file stores, and even write shell commands, indirect prompt injection has emerged as a critical threat vector.

AI-enabled attacks move faster than human analysts can track, at a scale that traditional SOCs weren’t designed to withstand. eCrime breakout times collapsed to 29 minutes on average in 2025, with the fastest clocked at 27 seconds. The rise of frontier AI models is expected to compress the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, intensifying pressure on SOC teams. Defending against AI-accelerated adversaries requires a new operating model.

The browser is the operating environment for modern work — it’s where employees access email, SaaS applications, collaboration tools, HR systems, finance platforms, customer data, developer resources and AI services. All of this activity makes the browser a high-value target for attackers because it sits between users, identities, applications, and sensitive enterprise data.

Identities, permissions, exposed resources, and sensitive data can all contribute to risk regardless of whether they reside in AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. However, security teams often encounter uneven visibility and coverage across disparate cloud environments, and face difficulty in consistently understanding risk across a multi-cloud estate.

As organizations rush to deploy AI agents across enterprises to handle HR cases, write and execute code, and manage customer interactions, they very often need to grant them access to sensitive systems and data.

Organizations are struggling to detect, investigate, and contain cloud threats before adversaries achieve their goals. The new CrowdStrike State of Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) Survey highlights the primary challenges they face: Together, these challenges are creating opportunities for threat actors to successfully breach cloud environments.

Sharing applications with the world is no easy task. Developers struggle to ensure compatibility across different platforms, vendors continually search for new channels to showcase and distribute their software, and users often encounter hurdles when installing and updating the applications. To help solve this challenge, Microsoft offers multiple solutions including its Microsoft Store, the native Windows Installer component (.msi packages), and a lesser-known but powerful option: ClickOnce technology.

Following our deep dive into the internals of ClickOnce application deployment in Part 1 of this two-part blog series, let’s focus on the security implications of this technology. In this blog, we examine how threat actors can weaponize ClickOnce features, and we reveal what we believe to be a new abuse that security teams need to be aware of.