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Using the OWASP GenAI Security Project’s AI Threat Defense Compass to Deploy Microsoft Copilot Securely

The AI frontier is packed with opportunity. Generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot promise real gains in productivity, efficiency, and business value. At the same time, they introduce new and unfamiliar risks—some well understood, others still emerging.

The challenge for most organizations is simple to state but hard to execute:

How do we capture the benefits of AI while avoiding the ways it can cause harm?

That’s exactly the problem the OWASP GenAI Security Project’s AI Threat Defense Compass is designed to solve.

This post walks through how the Compass can be used as a practical, repeatable methodology for securely deploying :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1} in an enterprise environment.

What Is the AI Threat Defense Compass?

The AI Threat Defense Compass is part of the :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2} Generative AI Security Project. Its goal is to help organizations identify, prioritize, and act on AI-related cyber risks—without slowing innovation to a crawl.

It was created for:

  • CISOs and security leaders
  • Red teamers and threat modelers
  • Privacy and legal teams
  • Anyone responsible for deploying AI securely in an organization

Rather than reinventing guidance, the Compass operationalizes existing OWASP GenAI resources into something teams can actually use.

At its core, it answers one critical question:

“What is the worst thing I need to be prepared for?”

A Methodology Built on the OODA Loop

The Compass uses the OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—so security teams can move at the same speed as the AI frontier.

  • Observe
    Identify the problem, the deployment context, and the threats you need to care about.

  • Orient
    Gather intelligence: vulnerabilities, incidents, legal exposure, and unknowns you need to resolve.

  • Decide
    Make informed, risk-based decisions grounded in business impact.

  • Act
    Implement mitigations, defenses, and a delivery roadmap—then iterate.

This loop is intentionally iterative. You move quickly to a decision, act, reassess, and repeat as conditions change.

Integrating with Existing Security Processes

One of the strengths of the Compass is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It aligns AI risk with familiar security frameworks and processes, including:

  • CPE, CVE, and CWE
  • MITRE ATT&CK and ATLAS
  • Existing threat and vulnerability management workflows

This makes it far easier to integrate AI risk into how your organization already operates.

AI Deployment Profiles

The Compass defines multiple deployment profiles, recognizing that not all AI risk looks the same:

  1. External AI Threats
    How adversaries may use AI against your organization.

  2. Internal / Existing AI
    AI already embedded in applications you’re using today.

  3. Custom or Model-Building Projects
    Risks specific to teams training or fine-tuning models.

  4. Licensed Enterprise AI Tools
    The focus of this example: deploying tools like Microsoft Copilot.

For Copilot, the organization is primarily a model user, not a model builder—an important distinction that affects both risk and remediation strategy.

Step 1: Start with the Playbook and Threat Profiles

Using the Compass begins with downloading:

  • The playbook
  • The Compass spreadsheet tool

Appendix A of the playbook contains threat profiles—a comprehensive checklist of AI-related concerns. You don’t tackle everything at once. Instead, you identify what matters most for your deployment and start building a priority list.

The point isn’t perfection. It’s momentum.

Step 2: Define Business Success First

Before diving into threats, the Compass forces an important discipline: define success in business terms.

For example:

  • Deploy Microsoft Copilot enterprise-wide
  • Improve productivity by 20%
  • Target $6M in annual value

These numbers matter. They allow you to balance business upside against security risk and potential impact—instead of treating security decisions in isolation.

Step 3: Understand the Deployment Context

Microsoft Copilot doesn’t have a single system card because it’s composed of multiple models. Instead, Microsoft provides equivalent transparency through:

  • Responsible AI documentation
  • Transparency notes
  • Product-specific FAQs

If individual models are identified, teams can still review their model cards directly.

Understanding whether you are a model deployer or model consumer is critical. While threats like model poisoning or weight theft may still exist, the likelihood, impact, and remediation cost differ significantly.

Step 4: Attack Surface Modeling (1–5 Scale)

The Compass uses lightweight attack surface modeling to answer a simple question:

Is this a five-alarm fire—or a one-alarm fire?

Threats are scored on a 1–5 scale, with definitions customized to your organization. Financial thresholds matter here. For some organizations, $1M is catastrophic; for others, $5M is the floor.

This step turns abstract AI threats into something executives can actually reason about.

Step 5: Define “Nuclear Disaster” Scenarios

Next, teams identify worst-case scenarios:

  • What is the single worst day this deployment could cause?
  • What would cleanup cost—financially, legally, reputationally?

By working backward from these scenarios, teams can design controls that prevent existential failures, not just minor issues.

In the Orient phase, teams gather real-world evidence:

  • CVEs related to the deployment
  • Mapping to OWASP Top 10 and GenAI Top 15 risks
  • Incident data from AI incident databases
  • Financial impact examples
  • Litigation and regulatory exposure (for example, via university AI litigation databases)

This grounds AI risk discussions in actual outcomes, not speculation.

Step 7: Red Teaming and Testing

Before production rollout, the Compass emphasizes AI red teaming:

  • Test real attack paths
  • Identify failure modes
  • Assign severity using guidance from Bugcrowd or CVSS-style scoring
  • Normalize results into the same 1–5 risk scale

Some judgment is unavoidable—but structured judgment beats guesswork.

Step 8: Build the Act Strategy and Roadmap

With all inputs in place, teams move to action:

  • Define remediation strategies
  • Assign owners
  • Set timelines aligned with business deployment goals

The dashboard becomes a single source of truth:

  • Where you started
  • What’s in progress
  • What leadership should prioritize next

And then—you loop back to Observe and repeat.

Compass Is a Methodology, Not Just a Tool

The AI Threat Defense Compass is open source by design. Organizations are encouraged to:

  • Modify scoring models
  • Add rigor where needed
  • Adapt it to their culture and risk tolerance

It’s meant to help teams deploy AI quickly and safely, not slow them down.