By Byron V. Acohido

Penetration testing – pen tests – traditionally have been something companies might do once or twice a year.

Related: Cyber espionage is on the rise

Bad news is always anticipated. That’s the whole point. The pen tester’s assignment is to seek out and exploit egregious, latent vulnerabilities – before the bad guys — thereby affording the organization a chance to shore up its network defenses.

Pen testing has limitations, of course. The probes typically take considerable effort to coordinate and often can be more disruptive than planned.

These shortcomings have been exacerbated by digital transformation, which has vastly expanded the network attack surface.

I had the chance at Black Hat 2022 to visit with Snehal Antani and Monti Knode, CEO and director of customer success, respectively, at Horizon3.ai, a San Francisco-based startup, which launched in 2020. Horizon3 supplies “autonomous” vulnerability assessment technology.

Co-founder Antani previously served as the first CTO for the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)  and Knode was a commander in the U.S. Air Force 67th Cyberspace Operations Group. They argue that U.S. businesses need to take a wartime approach the cybersecurity. For a full drill down, please give the accompanying podcast a listen.

Horizon3’s flagship service, NodeZero, is designed to continuously assess an organization’s network attack surface to identify specific scenarios by which an attacker might combine stolen credentials with misconfigurations or software flaws to gain a foothold.