Vulnerability response: Built for humans, outpaced by machines. [CyberWire-X]
6/21/202625 min
For years, security teams had time between discovery and exploitation. Time to triage. Time to validate. Time to prioritize what to fix first. AI has compressed that window. Frontier models now discover and chain vulnerabilities faster than human analysts can confirm them, and the gap between finding and fixing is shrinking in both directions.
In this episode of CyberWire-X, N2K’s Dave Bittner and Federico Kirschbaum, Head of XBOW Security Lab, explore what it actually means to run autonomous offensive security, why validation workflows built for quarterly testing cycles struggle to keep up, and how practitioners are redefining what a tested application looks like when the pace of offense has fundamentally changed.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDave Bittner· Host0:00
[electronic music] You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. [electronic music] Welcome to CyberWire X. I'm Dave Bittner. For decades, vulnerability management has operated on a simple assumption: defenders would have at least some time between discovering a weakness and seeing it exploited. That assumption is rapidly breaking down. Advances in AI are changing the economics and speed of offensive security. Today's frontier models can identify vulnerabilities, connect attack paths, and surface exploitable conditions at a pace that challenges traditional security workflows. Processes built around quarterly assessments and human-led validation are being pressured by systems that can operate continuously and at machine speed. So what happens when the bottleneck is no longer finding vulnerabilities, but confirming and fixing them fast enough? Joining me today is Federico Hirschbaum, head of Expo Security Lab. Federico brings more than two decades of experience in cybersecurity and is also the co-founder of Faraday Security and Ekoparty, one of Latin America's most influential hacking conferences. We'll discuss autonomous