nightcrawler

Nightcrawler An autonomous penetration testing agent that runs entirely on a smartphone. Drop the phone on a network, walk away, and it discovers hosts, maps services, finds vulnerabilities, and generates a pentest report — all without cloud connectivity. ░█▄░█ █ █▀▀ █░█ ▀█▀ █▀▀ █▀█ ▄▀█ █░█░█ █░░...

APTS

What is OWASP APTS? A governance standard for autonomous penetration testing platforms. It defines what these systems must do to operate safely, transparently, and within defined boundaries, whether they are delivered by vendors, operated as a service, or built in-house by enterprise security tea...

AgentTrap: Stateful Feedback Deception against Autonomous Penetration Testing Agents

Autonomous penetration testing agents conduct multi-step attacks by continuously adapting their plans and actions to target responses. As a common defense, honeypots can be deployed to divert these agents from real assets by presenting decoy services, while also supporting attack tracing and acti...

The Fly That Stopped: Mushroom-Body-Inspired Habituation As a Reward-Free Scheduling Prior for Autonomous Penetration Testing

Autonomous security-testing agents can spend much of a fixed action budget repeating earlier tool selections. We evaluate a reward-free scheduler inspired by mushroom-body novelty processing in Drosophila. It combines sparse state encoding with decaying habituation counters over structural URL...

Your Critical Vulnerabilities Might Not Be Your Biggest Risk

Security teams have become exceptionally talented at finding vulnerabilities. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to optimizing the process for determining which of those vulnerabilities actually create a path to compromise. A critical vulnerability may look alarming on a scanner report, but if ...

Baselines Before Architecture: Evaluating Coding Agents for Autonomous Penetration Testing

Recent autonomous penetration testing papers report high benchmark scores while adding multi-component security harnesses around frontier LLMs. Because these systems often change both architecture and backbone model, it is difficult to tell how much performance comes from the harness rather than...

pentestai

PentestAI Autonomous penetration testing framework for intent...

ExploitIQ

⚡ ExploitIQ Autonomous AI-Powered Penetration Testing Assis...

Hand over the keys for Shannon’s shenanigans

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Last week, yet another security AI tool made the rounds on social media: Shannon, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing tool created by Keygraph. It "autonomously hunts for attack vectors in your code, then uses its built-in...