AI risk management for marketplaces



AI benefits of marketplaces

Now almost all large digital marketplaces are AI-driven marketplaces. This means they rely on artificial intelligence solutions like content moderation, image recognition or smart recommendations. These solutions filter content, recommend the most relevant products to shoppers, and help ensure that users publish appropriate items or leave feedback.


The flip side: AI risks

Online marketplaces and online shops, like any other internet services, have to monitor the appropriateness of countless items and real user testimonials per day. 

The European Union cares about the threats online platforms can bring to their users, so they decided to release two regulations: The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) and The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), addressing illegal content, transparent advertising and disinformation. Non-compliance can result in a fine up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover.

Furthermore, due to the popularity of AI-based solutions used in marketplaces and online shops, this industry is extremely prone to attacks. If you own a marketplace or plan to launch an online shop, keep in mind the risks associated with it.


Risks for image moderation and spam filters

Automated image analysis can misclassify spam and toxic online comments if malicious actors modify the text. This makes content moderation and spam filters ineffective.


Bypassing content moderation and spam filters

Automated text analysis can misclassify spam and toxic online comments if malicious actors modify the text. This makes content moderation and spam filters ineffective.


AI-driven fake content

Deepfakes make it possible to generate fake videos and images. Fake news detectors are special systems trained to detect artificially generated content. If manipulated, detectors can fail to recognize fake, which will lead to them being mistakenly blocked. Automated content integrity can misidentify disinformation.


Inaccurate recommendations

Search pages can show unsafe or manipulated results in case of strategic data poisoning. These attacks refer to attempts to pollute machine learning models and threaten their integrity as well as to control the behavior of a trained model. They impact the ability to produce correct results.


LLMs and AI Chatbots

AI language models and chatbots such as GPT, Claude are vulnerable to various attacks: prompt injections, jailbreaks, data stealing, adversarial examples, and other safety bypass techniques.


AI incidents

  • Content moderation systems implemented by social networks can be bypassed easily, and there are over 100 research articles published that are describing various ways to do that.
  • Algorithms used by content filters can be spoofed by hackers to publish any illegal and offensive content. A number of examples have already been published in various research papers.
  • Inference attacks on AI algorithms can be used to find out if an algorithm uses your own data in the training dataset, which can violate privacy.
  • Advertising ML-based algorithms can be spoofed in order to perform fraudulent actions.
  • Sentiment analysis can be bypassed to post comments that seem acceptable but are detected by AI systems as inappropriate, therefore downgrading the publication.

How we can help with AI risk management

Our team of security professionals has deep knowledge and considerable skills in cyber security, AI algorithms, and models that underlie any content moderation system. Your algorithms can be tested against the most critical AI vulnerability categories that include Evasion, Poisoning, Inference, Trojans, Backdoors, and others.

We offer Solutions for  Awareness, Assessment, and Assurance areas to provide 360-degree end-to-end visibility on the AI threat landscape. 

  • Secure AI Awareness to demonstrate AI risks and shape AI governance strategy. It consists of Policy Checkup, AI Risks Training Threat Intelligence for informed decisions.
  • Secure AI Assessment helps to perform AI integrity validation and identify AI vulnerabilities through Threat Modeling, Vulnerability Audit, and automated AI Red Teaming.
  • Secure AI Assurance helps to remediate AI risks and implement a lifecycle for AI integrity. It consists of Security Evaluation, Risk Mitigation, and Attack Detection.

Drop us a line!

Have doubts about the security of AI-based solutions used in your company, worry about the trustworthiness of the whole industry or the reputation of your business? Please write to us!