FireCompass Unveils Agent AI for Ethical Hacking & Autonomous Penetration Testing

 8th August 2024 Firecompass, a Saas startup in Continuous Penetration Testing and Red Teaming, announced the launch of its Generative-AI powered Agent AI for Ethical Hacking & Autonomous Penetration Testing. FireCompass Agent AI is natively integrated with the FireCompass Platform and autonomously executes the entire penetration testing workflow.

Unlike current generative AI tools that typically only provide interfaces or generic suggestions, Agent AI executes the tasks autonomously, orchestrating to achieve specific objectives like finding organization-specific vulnerability information, generating tailored attack plans, and autonomously executing specific attack playbooks to demonstrate potential breaches. The platform dramatically increases testing coverage, accelerates the discovery of complex attack paths, and enhances the productivity of human pen-testers. This capability is available as an add-on to FireCompass’ existing platform for Automated Pen Testing, Red Teaming, and External Attack Surface Management.

India faces severe cybersecurity challenges, ranking among the most targeted countries globally. CERT-In reports a 25-fold increase in breaches over 5 years, with each breach costing an average of $2.18 million (RBI). A shortage of 800,000 cybersecurity professionals (World Economic Forum) amplifies the immediate need for AI-driven autonomous solutions.

“An average organization conducts ethical hacking or penetration testing on the top 20% of their assets annually. However, attackers are leveraging automation and AI to continuously target 100% of the assets,” said Bikash Barai, CEO and Co-Founder of FireCompass. “Conventional Penetration Testing cannot match the pace of attackers. FireCompass GenAI & Agentic AI can help us achieve 10 to 100 times more frequency and cost efficiency than traditional models.”

Traditional Ethical Hacking or Penetration Testing involves multiple tools and manual effort. FireCompass Autonomous Pen Testing Agent AI with the LLM-powered interface eliminates the need for repetitive manual tasks, significantly improving delivery speed and the depth and breadth of testing.

“Automating penetration testing of complex, multi-stage attacks is the next level of penetration testing. Agent AI is a promising way to solve this otherwise hard problem,” said Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned security technologist called a “security guru” by the Economist.

  • Gaps with Standard LLMs in Penetration Testing
  • Standard LLMs have several limitations in the context of penetration testing:
  • They cannot answer queries specific to an organization (e.g., “Give me the list of IPs of all risky assets”).
  • They cannot create an organization-specific plan of attack for a given objective.
  • They cannot execute end-to-end Penetration Testing or red-teaming on their own.
  • Introducing Agent AI for Penetration Testing & Red Teaming

FireCompass combines Agent AI with Gen AI to create autonomous end-to-end penetration testing capabilities. While Gen AI typically makes suggestions, Agent AI executes the completion of a workflow to achieve specific objectives. This capability, available as an add-on to FireCompass’ existing platform, will:

  • Interact in natural language to provide organization-specific information on vulnerabilities and risks.
  • Generate attack plans tailored to an organization based on user-provided objectives, guardrails, and existing vulnerabilities.
  • Execute attacks autonomously and demonstrate how an organization can be breached.
  • FireCompass has already been awarded a patent by the USPTO for automated penetration testing and red teaming.
  • FireCompass’ Agent AI vs. Traditional Methods
  • FireCompass uses Agent AI and Gen AI to creatively generate and autonomously execute attack plans.
  • Provides 10-100x more testing with the same budget, making human PenTesters four times more productive.
  • Accelerates the discovery and mitigation of complex attack paths, reducing the risk window from months to hours.

FireCompass is considered a leader in Automated Pen Testing, Red Teaming, and Attack Surface Management by leading analysts like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. Founded by serial entrepreneurs and supported by leading VCs, the team holds multiple patents in cybersecurity and has discovered zero-day vulnerabilities in platforms such as McAfee, Microsoft BitLocker, Sophos, and AVG. FireCompass is trusted by Fortune 500 companies globally which includes Top 5 Global Telco, Top 10 Manufacturing Firms, Top 10 Technology, and Banking Firms.