Shadow AI Is The New Shadow IT, And Most Security Teams Are Flying Blind
SC Media, Friday, February 6th, 2026
Over 14,000 Ollama server instances are publicly accessible on the internet right now. According to a recent Cisco analysis, 20% of these actively host models susceptible to unauthorized access. BankInfoSecurity separately reported discovering more than 10,000 Ollama servers with no authentication layer - the result of hurried AI deployments by developers under pressure to deliver.
This is shadow IT reborn for the AI era - and it's happening faster than most security teams can track.
The visibility gap no one's talking about
When shadow IT first emerged as a concern, the threat was relatively straightforward: employees spinning up unauthorized SaaS applications or cloud instances. Security teams eventually developed tooling and processes to detect and govern these deployments. We adapted.