Are Visibility Gaps Putting Assets and AI at Risk?

Are visibility gaps putting assets and AI at risk?

This is the question that we’re looking at in this article.

We’re going to discuss things like the importance of asset visibility, shadow IT/AI, rogue AI agents, and what’s happening to your organization on the publicly facing Internet-at-large.

What is asset visibility?

Asset visibility is having an inventory of your hardware and software. There are several reasons to have this such as:

• To know what you have in your organization
• For compliance purposes
• Handy for insurance claims should a piece of hardware vaporize or get damaged
• Helps with trouble shooting issues
• Helps with detecting the use of unapproved hardware/software

Additionally, your external facing assets (web sites and social media) and your AI agents need accounting for.

To help maintain the asset inventory, your organization needs to pick a regular frequency to which you update it. Some cybersecurity frameworks require that you do this every 6 months or more frequently. On top of that, inventory should be updated if there’s a major change in assets.

Doing this will help maintain asset visibility.

Now let’s take a little look into AI assets.

AI Asset Visibility

With AI, visibility means several things:

• Knowing what AI assets you have
• Knowing who’s using them
• Detecting a user entering sensitive info into a chatbot
• Having a near real time authoritative registry for AI agents and who they belong to.
• Logging AI agents’/tools’ activities and communications

As an example of needing to see what AI tools are doing, look no further than the Cline supply chain attack from February 2026.

Cline is an AI coding tool and attackers managed to launch a supply chain attack that created a corrupt version of Cline that installed OpenClaw on 4000 developers’ systems. All of this was done through an indirect prompt injection attack the bad actors created as a github issue title on Cline’s github page.

Cline uses an AI bot to triage issues posted to github. The bot then read the malicious prompt injected into the attackers’ issue title and followed those instructions instead of doing the triage. You can read in more detail about the chain of events here.

In short, it’s important to know what AI tools and agents you have and how they behave.

Finally let’s take a look at what’s happening in the world outside of your office/home offices.

External Asset Visibility

The publicly facing Internet is your perimeter now. It has been for well over a decade.

The most obvious asset you own that’s on the publicly facing Internet is your website. And if you’re doing any digital marketing the other asset you use is your social media platforms.

So what does external asset visibility look like?

It looks like:

• An inventory of all your online accounts and who owns them.
• A search to see what devices of your organization are intentionally speaking to the publicly facing Internet and which devices shouldn’t be but are.
• Keeping track of IP addresses, domain names, SSL/TLS certificates
• Documenting where code bases reside (e.g. github)

And from just a plain visibility standpoint, keeping an eye on what’s happening externally can help find and/or address things like:

• Misonfigured systems
• Stolen Intellectual Property
• Expired certs and domain names
• Leaked internal or sensitive data to social channels
• Misuse of company assets
• Threat actors positioning to target your organization

Why is asset visibility important?

As we mentioned at the beginning, it helps with things like:

• Compliance
• Having a record of assets for the sake of just knowing what you have.
• Trouble shooting
• Detecting unauthorized use or security issues.

How we help

Here are our offerings that help with asset visibility and visibility in general.

External Cyber Risk and Threat Assessments

Our specialization are external cyber risk and threat assessments. We look to see what exists of yours on the publicly facing Internet that are cybersecurity, data privacy, reputation, or compliance issues. This service may also discover assets you forgot you had.

All of this helps with asset visibility and helping protect your organization.

SMB Cybersecurity Compliance Services

Along with External Cyber Risk and Threat Assessments, this category of services also include Cybersecurity Awareness Training, and Cybersecurity Framework Consulting.

Reach out

Does your organization have blind spots, including external ones, that you need help with?

Fill out the contact form below to schedule a free strategy call and get some peace of mind.