If your plan for securing a 40% larger attack surface this year is "work harder," you’ve already lost. We are living through a period of hyper-acceleration. Engineering teams ship code daily, and AI-generated code introduces complexity at unprecedented speed.
Traditional pentesting programs were designed for a slower development velocity. When you hire a legacy firm, it requires several days to conduct manual reconnaissance of the environment before the real creative pentesting begins. You are essentially paying for a learning curve.
This legacy model does not match the engineering velocity that is quickly becoming the norm. Security teams need a platform that leverages machine speed to empower human expertise, turning pentesting from a point-in-time event into a continuous capability.
The Problem: The Velocity Gap
Modern organizations are managing dynamic ecosystems with many teams relying on AI tooling as a primary means of development. This speed leads to undue exposure if testing lags. Vulnerabilities are not introduced once a year, but with every release. The gap between development velocity and security validation is where risk compounds.
Legacy models are too slow to meet today’s needs.
However, their supposed successors of autonomous AI-driven scanning tools are too noisy. These tools often miss sophisticated adversarial scenarios and the creative, high-impact vulnerabilities that require human intuition. They see individual cracks in the walls, but fail to see the tunnel under the floor that an attacker is digging into your systems.
The Solution: Adversarial Automation at Machine Scale
Today, we launch our Discovery Agents to close the velocity gap. By automating reconnaissance using the same tools and techniques as modern adversaries, we are bringing machine scale to the discovery process. Rather than relying on a static set of scanners, we leverage an evolving toolset. We select the right stack for each target based on years of pentesting expertise and the most effective tooling available. This approach ensures every pentest reflects the adversarial reality of 2026.
Our agents autonomously map your asset’s attack surface, from complex JavaScript routes to hidden APIs and forgotten subdomains. This includes retrospective reconnaissance to find old API versions and predictive discovery to uncover hidden administrative portals or backup files. This intelligence gathering is paired with AI-powered credential validation to ensure test readiness and establish an immediate baseline of exploitable risk before a human pentester ever engages.
Once our pentesting team begins their work, they don’t need to search for where to start. They see a prioritized map where findings have been deduplicated, triaged, and filtered for noise. Our pentesting is able to focus on chained exploitation, business logic abuse, and the creative attack scenarios of a sophisticated adversary.
The Reality of Modern Exposure: A Concrete Scenario
We are already seeing this impact in our enterprise customer environments. In a recent case, Discovery Agents identified a forgotten v1 API endpoint on a legacy subdomain. Because our agents are fueled by a decade of our proprietary data, the system immediately flagged the signature of a misconfigured authorization header.
In a traditional engagement, a pentester might have spent two days just finding this "ghost" target. Instead, the agents established the baseline, allowing the pentesting team to focus exclusively on active exploitation from hour one. The pentesting team chained that discovery into a sophisticated adversarial scenario, bypassing business logic to move laterally into a production environment. By automating the discovery phase, we enabled deeper testing that uncovered a cross-tenant data vulnerability a standalone scanner would have missed.
See the Cobalt Vision for Data-Driven Pentesting in Action
RSA has always been a bellwether for where the industry is heading, and this year is no different. In 2026, it’s clear that the future belongs to those who can leverage massive datasets to drive innovation without abstracting out human expertise.
Staying ahead requires using the best attacker tools at machine scale so you can focus on the right risks to your business. This is the moment to move from ad hoc testing to continuous, data-driven validation. Come find us at the Cobalt booth #N4519 at RSA to see how we are turning raw attack surfaces into weaponized exploit roadmaps. Or, if you’re ready to see how we can support your specific needs, let’s get a demo on the calendar.
