Introducing Autonomous Exposure Management: Offensive Security at Enterprise Scale

Autonomous Exposure Management runs XBOW across your whole application estate rather than one application at a time. Autonomous agents test targets in parallel from an attacker's starting perspective, with no source code and no credentials, and report the vulnerabilities they validate with reproducible evidence, whether that’s 50 applications or 3,000.

Key takeaways

• Across enterprises, teams own three to 10 times more applications than they pentest.
• XBOW finds your external application estate and brings it in as scoped targets. Our team runs that work, and you approve the list before testing starts.
• Agents test targets in parallel, on demand, with no scheduling.
• Testing starts from an attacker's perspective: no source code, no credentials.
• Every finding arrives with reproducible evidence, severity, and remediation guidance.

Why now?

Two things changed at once: AI made software cheaper to build, so teams ship more applications, faster. It also made vulnerability discovery cheap, so the industry now produces more findings than anyone can work through.

Most security teams have more findings than they can act on and no reliable way to tell which ones an attacker could use. Severity scores rank a queue, but they say nothing about whether someone outside can reach the thing they rank.

Proving exploitability turns that queue into a decision. It is also the part of the program that does not scale by hiring, which is why most teams prove it on a handful of applications a year and estimate the rest.

Your applications are the target

Across our enterprise customers, teams typically own three to 10 times more applications than they pentest. The ones nobody tests are lower priority, not lower risk, and attackers do not sort by your priority. These applications still present access to your critical systems via lateral movement and chaining vulnerabilities. Not covering all applications puts your entire portfolio at imminent risk.

Think about what sits outside your testing cycle: an older customer portal, a partner API, a campaign site, a service inherited through an acquisition. Your flagship applications get depth and frequency. The rest wait.

Your team has the expertise, but it does not have the hours to cover 500 applications.

Start with what you know, discover what you don’t

You do not need a clean inventory to start. XBOW finds your external application estate and brings it in as scoped targets. Our field engineers run that during the engagement, and you approve the target list before any testing begins.

Inside each target, XBOW explores before it attacks. It finds endpoints, user workflows, subdomains, and third-party services nobody listed, then sorts them into what it may attack and what it may only visit. Enterprise customers can change those designations, add anything XBOW missed, and see coverage gaps by vulnerability category.

None of this replaces your attack surface management tool. Discovery tools show what exists and what changed. XBOW shows which of them an attacker can access and exploit.

Approve the scope. Launch the waves

Once you approve the list, XBOW agents go to work across it. Thousands of agents attack in parallel, on demand, with no testing window to wait for. The testing is autonomous, and the engagement is managed. You give us a scope and what sits in it, and XBOW specialists coordinate the program from there.

Your last pentester got credentials, documentation, and sometimes source code. An attacker gets none of it. XBOW starts where the attacker starts, and a vulnerability found without credentials carries more weight, because someone outside can reach it the same way. Credentialed testing is available, but it is not where we begin.

That is the adversary half. The enterprise half is what makes it safe to run against production. You set the scope and the exclusions. Every action the agents take is logged and reviewable. Agents prove exploits benignly, so a SQL injection gets a one-time sleep rather than a dropped table. Assessments pause when a target becomes unstable and resume when it recovers.

WAF bypass that keeps testing moving at scale

XBOW can test with the web application firewall (WAF) in place. Agents identify the WAF, reason about the matching rule set, and attempt to bypass it the way an attacker would.

At portfolio scale, throughput depends on it. Every blocked request that needs a person to step in turns testing into a queue.

Moderna's deputy CISO described the moment it landed during their evaluation:

"XBOW identified a WAF bypass through a URL encoding trick that I missed during my own review. That was the moment that led us to choose XBOW as a partner." - Farzan Karimi, Deputy CISO, Moderna

A control in place is no guarantee that every path through it is closed.

From autonomous testing to verified fixes

Autonomous Exposure Management transforms how you secure your applications against AI-powered attackers. Your developers get reproducible evidence, severity, and remediation guidance for every finding. They see what was exploited and what it reached, then ship the fix and confirm the exploit no longer works.

That changes what a security team can plan for. When findings are proven, not probable, teams don't worry about what is real, but about who will fix it.

A global consumer goods manufacturer held tens of thousands of repositories with poor attribution, so the team often could not tell which repository ran as a live application. They ran one manual pentest a year and covered a fraction of the portfolio. They benchmarked several AI-assisted tools, and one returned so many findings it could not render a report. When they started using XBOW, they were able to assess all applications in their portfolio in four weeks. In their words, this effort would have required 100 pentesters and a lot of coordination in the past.

After seeing the exploitable findings from XBOW, the customer decided to build a dedicated remediation team to fix findings they can trust.

Where XBOW fits

Autonomous exposure management is the validation step that scales to the size of your estate rather than the size of your team.

It discovers your current inventory as a starting point, identifies exploitable vulnerabilities in your portfolio, and points to applications that can benefit from deep analysis. This approach extends human pentesters’ reach, freeing them for the investigations and business context that need them most.

You can get started with two easy paths: Start with the applications you already worry about, or let XBOW find the applications you have not catalogued. Either way, you approve the list before anything runs.

Join our upcoming webinar to learn more or talk to us about Autonomous Exposure Management.