CISO playbook

Caution

Shadow AI bypasses the controls you already own Employees pasting data into external generative models route around DLP, egress filtering and logging. The exposure is real regardless of which regulator you answer to; what changes per jurisdiction is the paperwork.

Spectorn is built to give security leadership deterministic, inspectable evidence about AI traffic instead of probabilistic assurances.

Goal: bring Shadow AI back under control

Uncontrolled use of external generative models (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others) leaks PII and proprietary intellectual property. Traditional firewalls and DLP tools cannot inspect encrypted API traffic or judge the semantic context of a prompt.

Spectorn changes where the control point sits:

One hub — API requests to external or internal models pass through the Spectorn gateway.
Context-aware DLP — the gateway analyses the intent in the payload and applies policy before the request leaves for the provider. An attempt to upload proprietary source code to a public model is stopped inside the perimeter when the rules recognise it and the policy blocks that category.
Hash-chained audit — every transaction is hashed into an append-only chain, so a later edit is detectable.

The audit trail

Important

Spectorn produces cryptographic evidence for each AI transaction, which is designed to support your audit. It does not, by itself, make your organisation compliant with any specific standard or regulation, and Spectorn makes no such certification claim on your behalf.

Each validation event appends an audit object:

JSON

{
  "timestamp": "2026-03-24T12:00:00Z",
  "actor": "employee-id-9982",
  "verdict": "DENY",
  "rule_violation": "DLP_SOURCE_CODE",
  "entropy_score": 0.89,
  "transaction_hash": "e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855"
}

Findings reach your SIEM as JSON events over HTTPS (spectorn.ai-finding.v1) at an address the tenant configures. There is no syslog output.

Evidence for an auditor

Today the evidence is the verdict chain above and the findings in your SIEM. Spectorn does not yet generate a sealed evidence pack; a period, policy and signature bundle for auditors is planned, not available.

The evidence is about what the gateway observed and enforced. Interpreting it against a particular framework remains the auditor's and your organisation's work.

Deployment control and vendor lock-in

Spectorn can be deployed inside your own perimeter rather than consumed as a multi-tenant service, so the security intelligence stays under your control:

you control the rules;
you own the logs;
you choose the hardware.

Fully disconnected (air-gapped) operation depends on which engines and update feeds you enable — signature and detector updates need a delivery path, and that path has to be designed deliberately rather than assumed.

For deployment details see the sovereign perimeter guide.