AI made attackers smarter. Now it’s giving mid-market companies a fighting chance
The rise of intelligent digital workers and autonomous AI agents is compounding an already urgent cybersecurity challenge: attack surfaces expanding faster than security teams can manually assess them.
That pressure is exactly why autonomous penetration testing is emerging as a critical discipline. AI-powered attackers are compressing the time from vulnerability discovery to exploitation from months to hours, and mid-market companies — those most likely to lack dedicated security headcount — are caught squarely in the crossfire, according to Chris Wallis (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Intruder Systems Ltd. But the situation is far from hopeless, with AI pen testing now presenting opportunities for defenders that scanners never could.
“The AI can start to understand your whole attack surface and start to reason about it in ways that previously would’ve taken a human to do,” Wallis said. “What AI is really doing now is closing that gap between what a pen test is and what scanners have been able to do in the past.”
Wallis spoke with theCUBE’s Scott Hebner at KB4-CON 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how AI is reshaping penetration testing, the expanding attack surface created by intelligent digital workers, and Intruder’s newly launched AI Pentesting capability. (* Disclosure below.)
