Making Continuous Offensive Security Operational with Microsoft

At RSA this year, XBOW and Microsoft are demonstrating a new approach to offensive security testing, one that moves beyond periodic penetration tests toward continuous validation of real-world risk.

For years, penetration testing has largely been a point-in-time exercise. A team runs a test, a report is generated, and security engineers manually translate those findings into remediation work. Meanwhile, organizations are making decisions about risk based on alerts, telemetry, and vulnerability data that often lack context about whether weaknesses are actually exploitable.

What we’re demonstrating together represents a different approach.

XBOW and Microsoft have integrated XBOW’s autonomous penetration testing platform with Microsoft Security Copilot and Microsoft Sentinel. The result is a workflow where offensive validation can run continuously rather than as a separate, periodic exercise.

A security practitioner starts in Microsoft Security Copilot and initiates an XBOW penetration test against a target application. The XBOW platform then launches an autonomous assessment, behaving much like a real attacker: probing endpoints, exploring attack paths, and validating whether vulnerabilities can actually be exploited.

Once the test runs, the validated findings are ingested into Microsoft Sentinel through a connector. Instead of living in a static report, the results become structured security telemetry that can be analyzed alongside other signals already present in the environment.

From there, practitioners can use Security Copilot to investigate the findings in context—analyzing attack paths and correlating results with Defender telemetry, Azure resources, and other signals.

This helps answer a much more important question than traditional vulnerability management typically provides. Instead of asking, “Is this vulnerability severe?” teams can ask: “Is this vulnerability actually exploitable in my environment?”

That distinction matters.

Security teams are drowning in vulnerability data, but very little of it reflects how an attacker would actually move through a system. Autonomous offensive testing provides that missing signal by validating exploit paths rather than simply identifying theoretical weaknesses.

What excites me most about this integration is that it enables a continuous loop. Penetration testing findings don’t sit in reports; they become living signals that help organizations continuously validate their defenses and prioritize remediation based on real exploitability.

At RSA, we’re showing what that looks like in practice.

To me, it’s a glimpse of where security testing is heading. When autonomous offensive testing runs continuously and its findings are integrated into the tools teams already use, organizations can understand and reduce real risk much faster.

If you’d like to see this workflow in action, watch the demo of the XBOW and Microsoft integration we’re showcasing at RSA.