AAISM ISACA Advanced in AI Security Management (AAISM) Exam Questions and Answers

AAISM emphasizes that the right to audit is the most critical contractual safeguard when outsourcing AI services. This allows the contracting organization to independently verify that the vendor is applying appropriate protections to training data, meeting compliance obligations, and upholding privacy requirements. Pseudonymization is a technical method, monitoring is operational, and certifications provide external assurance, but none give the direct, enforceable oversight that audit rights provide. In vendor contracts, the right to audit is the primary safeguard for data protection and governance.

According to AAISM lifecycle management guidance, the best justification for disabling an AI system immediately is the detection of excessive model drift. Drift results in outputs that are no longer reliable, accurate, or aligned with intended purpose, creating significant risks. Performance slowness and overly detailed outputs are operational inefficiencies but not critical shutdown triggers. Insufficient training should be addressed before deployment rather than after. The trigger for immediate deactivation in production is excessive drift compromising reliability.

In AI governance frameworks, credit scoring is treated as a high-risk application. For such systems, the highest-priority safeguard is human oversight to ensure fairness, accountability, and prevention of bias in automated decisions.

The AI Security Management™ (AAISM) domain of AI Governance and Program Management emphasizes that high-impact AI systems require explicit governance structures and human accountability. Human-in-the-loop design ensures that final decisions remain the responsibility of human experts rather than being fully automated. This is particularly critical in financial contexts, where biased outputs can affect individuals’ access to credit and create compliance risks.

Official ISACA AI governance guidance specifies:

High-risk AI systems must comply with strict requirements, including human oversight, transparency, and fairness.

The purpose of human oversight is to reduce risks to fundamental rights by ensuring humans can intervene or override an automated decision.

Bias controls are strengthened by requiring human review processes that can analyze outputs and prevent unfair discrimination.

Why other options are not the highest priority:

A. Regular updates improve accuracy but do not guarantee fairness or ethical decision-making. Model drift can introduce new bias if not governed properly.

B. Appeals mechanisms are important for accountability, but they operate after harm has occurred. Governance frameworks emphasize prevention through human oversight in the decision loop.

D. Restricting criteria to “objective metrics” is insufficient, as even objective data can contain hidden proxies for protected attributes. Bias mitigation requires monitoring, testing, and human oversight, not only feature restriction.

AAISM Domain Alignment:

Domain 1 – AI Governance and Program Management: Ensures accountability, ethical oversight, and governance structures.

Domain 2 – AI Risk Management: Identifies and mitigates risks such as bias, discrimination, and lack of transparency.

Domain 3 – AI Technologies and Controls: Provides the technical enablers for implementing oversight mechanisms and bias detection tools.

References from AAISM and ISACA materials:

AAISM Exam Content Outline – Domain 1: AI Governance and Program Management (roles, responsibilities, oversight).

ISACA AI Governance Guidance (human oversight as mandatory in high-risk AI applications).

Bias and Fairness Controls in AI (human review and intervention as a primary safeguard).

The AAISM study framework describes evasion attacks as attempts to manipulate or probe a trained model during inference by using crafted inputs that appear normal but cause the system to generate inconsistent or erroneous outputs. Contradictory results from nearly identical queries are a typical symptom of evasion, as the attacker is probing decision boundaries to find weaknesses. Poisoning attacks occur during training, not inference, while membership inference relates to exposing whether data was part of the training set, and model exfiltration involves extracting proprietary parameters or architecture. The clearest indication of contradictory outputs from similar queries therefore aligns directly with the definition of evasion attacks in AAISM materials.

The AAISM framework specifies that when adopting third-party AI tools, the right to audit is the most critical contractual and governance safeguard. This ensures that the organization can independently verify compliance with security, privacy, and ethical requirements throughout the lifecycle of the tool. Terms and conditions provide general usage guidance but often limit liability rather than ensuring transparency. Industry certifications may indicate good practice but do not substitute for direct verification. Roundtable testing is useful for evaluation but lacks enforceability. Only the contractual right to audit provides formal assurance that the tool operates in accordance with organizational policies and external regulations.

Themost effective SOC applicationof AI is indetecting subtle, hard-to-find attack patternsthat reduce false negatives.

AAISM technical control guidance notes that AI in SOCs is best applied to:

Enhance detection accuracy and sensitivity to anomalies.

Assist analysts in identifying hidden patterns that traditional rule-based systems miss.

Augment—not replace—human decision-making for high-confidence outcomes.

Options B and C incorrectly shift responsibility entirely to AI, which contradicts governance principles requiringhuman oversight. Option D is useful for efficiency, but theprimary effectivenesscomes fromimproving detection quality.

Therefore, the most effective use is toreduce false negatives and detect subtle attacks.

AAISM guidance states that when adopting AI, the most important step is to conduct a risk assessment and update the enterprise risk register. This ensures AI-specific risks are identified, documented, and integrated into the organization’s existing governance structures. Benchmarking peers provides context but does not address internal risk. Implementing methodologies and frameworks are important, but they precede or follow the assessment process. The decisive step that connects adoption to enterprise risk governance is updating the risk register with AI-specific risks.

The AAISM study material highlights blockchain as a control mechanism for managing deepfake risk because it provides immutable verification of digital media provenance. By anchoring original data signatures on a blockchain, organizations can verify authenticity and detect tampered or synthetic content. Data tagging helps organize but does not guarantee authenticity. MFA and adaptive authentication strengthen identity security but do not address content manipulation risks. Blockchain’s immutability and traceability make it the recognized technology for mitigating deepfake challenges.

The AAISM study materials highlight that AI-powered security tools provide the greatest benefit by reducing false positives in monitoring and access control systems. This improves efficiency, prevents alert fatigue, and enables security teams to focus on true threats. While timely analysis and incident response are benefits, they are not unique to AI-based tools and can be achieved with traditional methods. AI also does not remove the need for data classification, as classification underpins governance and compliance. The standout advantage is the improved accuracy and reduced false positives provided by AI.

AAISM materials specify that the composition of an AI red team must be tailored to the organization’s AI use cases. The purpose of red-teaming is to simulate realistic adversarial conditions aligned with the actual applications of AI. For example, testing a generative model requires different expertise than testing a fraud detection system. While resource availability, compliance requirements, and time-to-market pressures are practical considerations, they are secondary to aligning team expertise with use case scenarios. The most important factor is therefore the AI use cases themselves.

AAISM defines automation bias as the tendency of individuals to over-rely on AI-generated outputs even when contradictory real-world evidence is available. In this scenario, the driver ignores traffic signs and follows the AI’s instructions, showing blind reliance on automation. Selection bias relates to data sampling, reporting bias refers to misrepresentation of results, and confirmation bias involves interpreting information to fit pre-existing beliefs. The most accurate description is automation bias.

The AAISM technical controls framework emphasizes data validation as the primary safeguard against data poisoning attacks. Poisoning occurs when attackers insert malicious or corrupted data into training sets. Validation techniques verify the quality, authenticity, and consistency of input data before training, preventing compromised samples from corrupting the model. Restoration helps after compromise, watermarking protects ownership, and intrusion detection monitors networks rather than data quality. The most effective preventive measure is data validation.

AAISM categorizes the manipulation of an LLM at inference time, where crafted inputs cause outputs to serve attacker objectives, as an evasion attack. Evasion attacks exploit weaknesses in the model’s decision-making boundaries by altering queries to produce compromised or misleading outputs. Privilege escalation refers to unauthorized access rights, data poisoning targets the training phase, and model inversion reconstructs training data. In this case, manipulation of outputs to align with an attacker’s goals reflects an evasion attack.

The AAISM framework highlights that organizations adopting AI must ensure accountability structures are in place to govern ethical and responsible use. An accountability model assigns clear responsibility for decisions, outputs, and risks related to AI systems. While model cards provide transparency about a model’s design and performance, they are primarily documentation tools. Vendor monitoring focuses on third-party oversight, not internal accountability. Security by design improves resilience but does not by itself address ethical use. The governance approach that most directly supports responsible and ethical AI deployment is an accountability model.

According to AAISM governance principles, when AI functionality is added to existing services, the first consideration is contractual and service-level accountability. If AI outputs cannot be predefined, the existing service agreements may no longer reflect performance responsibilities or liability. Revising or updating the agreement ensures governance alignment, accountability, and risk management for AI-driven behavior. Phased approaches and performance explanations are valuable but occur later in project management. Developer accountability for customer inquiries is not a primary governance step. The most immediate consideration is revising service agreements when AI introduces new uncertainties.

AAISM’s governance guidance emphasizes that adopting AI for competitive advantage must begin with a comprehensive strategic roadmap for integration. This roadmap aligns AI adoption with business objectives, sets priorities, defines milestones, and ensures coordination across functions. Risk management, training, and tool procurement are essential, but they are tactical steps that follow once the strategic direction is defined. Without a roadmap, adoption becomes fragmented and risks misalignment with business strategy. The most important consideration at the adoption stage is therefore creating a strategic integration roadmap.

According to AAISM technical controls, the element of security frameworks that directly safeguards output integrity is ensuring that bias-related risks are maintained within acceptable ranges. This ensures that AI results remain consistent, fair, and reliable, preserving trust in outputs. Ethical awareness, architectural disclosure, and legal responsibilities are governance practices but do not directly secure output integrity. Output integrity is primarily protected through bias management and ongoing evaluation of fairness and accuracy.

AAISM lifecycle governance guidance specifies that before any AI solution is moved into production, it must undergo testing, evaluation, validation, and verification to ensure accuracy, resilience, security, and compliance with standards. These steps confirm that the solution performs as expected under varied conditions. Conducting gap analysis is part of compliance checks but comes earlier in design. Management sign-off provides approval but cannot substitute for assurance of technical reliability. Deploying prototypes is a testing method but not the final assurance step. The critical requirement is a complete cycle of testing, validation, and verification.

The AAISM materials classify availability attacks as attempts to disrupt or degrade the functioning of an AI system so that its outputs become unreliable or unusable. In this scenario, the fraudulent social media accounts are deliberately overwhelming the AI tool with misleading negative reviews, undermining its ability to deliver accurate sentiment analysis. This aligns directly with the concept of an availability attack. Model inversion relates to reconstructing training data from outputs, deepfakes involve synthetic content generation, and data poisoning corrupts the training set rather than manipulating inputs at runtime. Therefore, the fraudulent review campaign is most accurately identified as an availability attack.

AAISM governance content highlights that the greatest intellectual property challenge in the context of AI-generated works is determining rightful ownership. Traditional copyright law requires human authorship, but AI-generated creations blur authorship and ownership boundaries, raising legal uncertainty about who can claim rights. Trademark enforcement, trade secret protection, and licensing frameworks are established areas of IP law but do not present the same fundamental challenge as ownership attribution. For AI-generated content, the central legal dilemma is ownership of the creation.

AAISM’s risk management content describes red-teaming in generative AI as focused on deliberately crafting adversarial prompts to test whether the model produces unexpected or undesired outputs that violate safety, integrity, or compliance standards. The goal is not to stress system performance or randomly disrupt outputs, but rather to uncover vulnerabilities in how the model responds to manipulative inputs. This allows organizations to improve resilience against prompt injection, jailbreaking, or harmful content generation. The correct answer is therefore generate outputs that are unexpected using adversarial inputs.

According to the AAISM framework, prompt injection is the act of deliberately crafting malicious or manipulative inputs to override, bypass, or exploit the model’s intended controls. In this case, the attacker is targeting the integrity of the model’s outputs by exploiting weaknesses in how it interprets and processes prompts. Jailbreaking is a subtype of prompt injection specifically designed to override safety restrictions, while evasion attacks target classification boundaries in other ML contexts, and remote code execution refers to system-level exploitation outside of the AI inference context. The most accurate classification of this attack is prompt injection.

Themodel cardis a governance artifact that communicatesintended use, performance characteristics, limitations, fairness considerations, and ethical notesof an ML model.

AAISM governance materials highlight thatstakeholder trustcomes from transparency and explainability. While hyperparameters and data quality controls are technical details, they lack stakeholder-facing clarity. Model prototyping is part of development but not a governance record.

Model cards are explicitly recommended to:

Provideexplainabilityand context for decision-making.

Demonstrate governance, transparency, and compliance.

Enable stakeholders (regulators, auditors, business leaders) to trust the system.

Therefore, themodel cardis the artifact that best enhances trust.

AAISM governance practices identify ownership and accountability as the most critical element in any centralized AI inventory. An AI inventory provides oversight by cataloging all AI assets within an organization, and assigning responsibility ensures that each system has clear governance, monitoring, and compliance coverage. While use cases, training data, and registries are valuable metadata, they do not guarantee accountability. Without defined ownership, no party is responsible for addressing risk, bias, or incidents. Therefore, the most important information to include is ownership and accountability details for each AI system.