penetration testing
Training an AI agent to attack LLM applications like a real adversary
Most enterprise software development teams now ship AI-powered applications faster than traditional penetration testing can keep up with. A security team with 500 applications …
Kali Linux 2026.1 ships BackTrack mode, eight new tools, and a kernel upgrade to 6.18
Penetration testers running Kali Linux have a new release to work with. Version 2026.1 delivers the annual theme refresh, a new BackTrack-inspired mode in kali-undercover, …
Bug bounties are broken, and the best security pros are moving on
Penetration testing engagements are organized as scheduled contracts with defined scope, set testing windows, and direct communication channels with client teams. Cobalt’s …
What happens when AI teams compete against human hackers
A cybersecurity competition produced what may be the largest controlled dataset comparing AI-augmented teams to human-only teams on professional-grade offensive security …
BlacksmithAI: Open-source AI-powered penetration testing framework
BlacksmithAI is an open-source penetration testing framework that uses multiple AI agents to execute different stages of a security assessment lifecycle. A multi-agent …
Open-source AI pentesting tools are getting uncomfortably good
AI has come a long way in the pentesting world. We are now seeing open-source tools that can genuinely mimic how a human tester works, not just fire off scans. I dug into …
The 2026 State of Pentesting: Why delivery and follow-through matter more than ever
Penetration testing has evolved significantly over the past several years. While uncovering exploitable vulnerabilities remains the core goal, the real differentiator today is …
Product showcase: Penetration test reporting with PentestPad
If you’ve done a pentest before, you know things can get messy fast. You start organized, but a few hours in, notes are scattered, screenshots have odd filenames, and small …
Kali Linux 2025.4: New tools and “quality-of-life” improvements
OffSec has released Kali Linux 2025.4, a new version of its widely used penetration testing and digital forensics platform. Most of the changes are related to appearance and …
AI-driven threats are heading straight for the factory floor
In this Help Net Security interview, Natalia Oropeza, Chief Cybersecurity Officer at Siemens, discusses how industrial organizations are adapting to a shift in cyber risk …
Strix: Open-source AI agents for penetration testing
Security teams know that application flaws tend to show up at the worst time. Strix presents itself as an open source way to catch them earlier by using autonomous agents that …
sqlmap: Open-source SQL injection and database takeover tool
Finding and exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities is one of the oldest and most common steps in web application testing. sqlmap streamlines this process. It is an …