When Your Vendor’s AI Becomes Your Problem
A real incident. A real client. A real wake-up call.
At 3:34 pm on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, a CFO at one of Black Creek Cybersecurity’s clients received an alarming message. Their third-party AI phone assistant had been compromised, and the attacker wasn’t just sitting quietly on the data. They were broadcasting it.
The extortion email, sent directly to hundreds of the company’s own customers, was ruthless in its specificity. Garage door codes. Gate PINs. Lockbox combinations. Hidden key locations. Names, phone numbers, home addresses, all paired with deeply personal notes lifted straight from customer support call summaries: “Husband is disabled.” “Mom is in the hospital.” “Cannot leave the premises.”
The attacker’s message to those customers was blunt: your vendor trusted an insecure system. Your data, nearly 900,000 customers’ worth, is in our hands. Pressure them to pay up.
What Actually Happened
The compromised vendor was an AI-powered service that summarised customer support interactions across phone, chat, and email. It’s the kind of tool that’s become increasingly common. Useful, efficient, and easy to plug in via API.
The problem? When it was breached, everything those AI summaries had quietly catalogued over time became a weapon.
The CFO’s initial response was swift: disable the API keys. But as they noted themselves, “bad actors likely already have pulled the data.” With the system entirely outside their control, next steps were limited. Vendor is investigating. Sit tight.
That’s a deeply uncomfortable place to be.
Where Black Creek Came In
This is exactly the kind of moment the Black Creek team prepares clients for: not if it happens, but when.
We jumped in immediately to help the client triage the incident: understanding the actual scope of exposure, assessing what data had genuinely been at risk, walking through immediate containment steps, and thinking through downstream obligations: customers, regulators, partners.
But beyond the immediate fire-fighting, this incident surfaced two structural gaps that BCC’s process is specifically designed to close:
- Third-party vendor oversight. Do you actually know what data your vendors are touching, and what their security posture looks like? AI-powered tools are being plugged into business workflows at pace, often with minimal vetting. This vendor had access to sensitive customer interaction data at scale. Was there ever a security review? A data processing agreement with teeth? A clear answer to: what happens if you get breached?
- API key management. Disabling API keys was the right first move, but doing it reactively, under pressure, at 3:34 pm is not a programme. BCC works with clients to maintain a clear inventory of what keys exist, what they access, and how quickly they can be rotated or killed if something goes wrong.
The BCC Approach
Black Creek Cybersecurity works exclusively with private equity firms and their portfolio companies. Our background inside PE deal teams means we understand the commercial reality: PortCos are lean, timelines are compressed, and nobody has budget for security theatre.
That’s why BCC works against a focused framework, the Top 7 Cyber Poverty Line, to make sure clients are doing what actually needs to be done, and tracking improvement over time. No commissions. No vendor relationships that cloud the advice. Just an independent view of where the real risks are.
Part of that process is a structured critical systems and third-party provider review: mapping the tools and vendors that touch sensitive data, evaluating their security controls, and putting documented protocols in place for when, not if, one of them has a bad day.
This client had capable people who responded quickly. What BCC added was the framework to act with confidence, and the conversation that follows: what needs to change so we’re better positioned next time?
Incidents like this are becoming more common as AI tools proliferate across the vendor landscape. If you don’t know what data your third-party providers are sitting on, or what you’d do if they were breached, that’s the conversation to have now.
If you’re looking to bring structure, accountability, and practical insight to cybersecurity across your portfolio, it’s worth a closer look.
If you’ve had an incident and need a confidential, no-obligation review, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.