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XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#102Receiving hundreds of AI generated bug reports would be so demoralizing and probably turn me off from maintaining an open source project forever. I think developers are going to eventually need tools to filter out slop. If you didn’t take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
Open source maintainers have been complaining about this for a while. https://sethmlarson.dev/slop-security-reports . I'm assuming the proliferation of AI will have some significant changes on/already has had for open source projects.
Yes! I recently had to manually answer and close a Github issue telling me I might have pushed an API key to github.
No, "API_KEY=put-your-key-here;" is a placeholder and I should not have to waste time writing that.
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#103Xbow has really smart people working on it, so they're well-aware of the usual 30-second critiques that come up in this thread. For example, they take specific steps to eliminate false positives. The #1 spot in the ranking is both more of a deal and less of a deal than it might appear. It's less of a deal in that HackerOne is an economic numbers game. There are countless programs you can sign up for, with varied diff…
> Top infosec talent doesn't want to do it (and there's not enough of it). What is the top talent spending its time on?
Working from 9 to 5 for a guaranteed salary that is not dependent on how many bugs you find before anybody else, and not having to argue your case or negotiate the bounty.
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#104Ive also invested some time in this space over the last several years. A group Im in took the approach of custom building agents for each CTF we approached. Our best so far was an agent participating in an AI CTF against current top injection/jailbreak and leakage defense techniques, the agent autonomously completed 22 of the 40 challenges and at one point held 8th place out of 380 teams. It eventually plateaued and slipped to 12th by the end.
The tooling and models are maturing quickly and there is definitely some value in autonomous security agents, both offensive and defensive- but also still requires alot of work, knowledge(my group is all ML people), skill, planning- if you want to approach anything more than bug bashing.
This recent paper from Dreadnode discusses a benchmark for this sort of challenge: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14682
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#105Xbow has really smart people working on it, so they're well-aware of the usual 30-second critiques that come up in this thread. For example, they take specific steps to eliminate false positives. The #1 spot in the ranking is both more of a deal and less of a deal than it might appear. It's less of a deal in that HackerOne is an economic numbers game. There are countless programs you can sign up for, with varied diff…
Honestly I think this is extremely impressive, but it also raises what I call the “junior programmer” problem. Say XBOW gets good enough to hoover up basically all that money and can do it cost-effectively. What then happens to the pipeline of security researchers?
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#106Xbow has really smart people working on it, so they're well-aware of the usual 30-second critiques that come up in this thread. For example, they take specific steps to eliminate false positives. The #1 spot in the ranking is both more of a deal and less of a deal than it might appear. It's less of a deal in that HackerOne is an economic numbers game. There are countless programs you can sign up for, with varied diff…
Maybe that is because the article is chaotic (like any "AI" article) and does not really address the false positive issue in a well.presented manner? Or even at all? Below people are reading the tea leaves to get any clue.
There’s two whole paragraphs under a dedicated heading. I don’t think the problem is with the article here. Paragraphs reproduced below:
AI can be remarkably effective at discovering a broad range of vulnerabilities—but the real challenge isn’t always detection, It’s precision. Automation has long struggled with false positives, and nowhere is this more evident than in vulnerability scanning. Tools that flag dozens of irrelevant issues often create more work than they save. When AI enters the equation, the stakes grow even higher: models can generalize well, but verifying technical edge cases is a different game entirely.
To ensure accuracy, we developed the concept of validators, automated peer reviewers that confirm each vulnerability XBOW uncovers. Sometimes this process leverages a large language model; in other cases, we build custom programmatic checks. For example, to validate Cross-Site Scripting findings, a headless browser visits the target site to verify that the JavaScript payload was truly executed. (don’t miss Brendan Dolan-Gavitt’s BlackHat presentation on AI agents for Offsec)
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's been very strange being on the other side of that after 10 years in academia! But it's totally reasonable for people to be skeptical when there's a bunch of money sloshing around. I'll see if I can get time to do a paper to accompany the BH talk. And hopefully the agent traces of individual vulns will also help.
J'accuse! You were required to do a paper for BH anyways! :)
Hmm, is that really true? I spoke at BH last year and was not required to submit a paper.
And based on the briefings link, there surely isn't a paper link, only slides and tool.
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walt Disney doesn't pay bug bounties. AT&T's bounties go up to $5k, which is decent but still not much. It's possible that the market for bugs is efficient.
Walt Disney's program covers substantially more surface area, there's 6? publicly traded companies listed there. In addition to covering far fewer domains & apps, AT&T's conditions and exclusions disqualify a lot more. The market for bounties is a circus, breadcrumbs for free work from people trying to 'make it'. It can safely be analogized to the classic trope of those wanting to work in games getting paid fractiona…
> The market for bounties is a circus, breadcrumbs for free work from people trying to 'make it'.
> The number of CVSS vulns with a score above 8 that have floated across the front page of HN in the past year without anyone getting paid tells you that much.
You make it sound like there's a ton of people going around who can just dig up CVSS vulns above 8 and is making me all confused. Is that really happening? I have a single bounty on H1 just to show I could do it, and that still took ages and was a shitty bug.
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#109Xbow has really smart people working on it, so they're well-aware of the usual 30-second critiques that come up in this thread. For example, they take specific steps to eliminate false positives. The #1 spot in the ranking is both more of a deal and less of a deal than it might appear. It's less of a deal in that HackerOne is an economic numbers game. There are countless programs you can sign up for, with varied diff…
> Top infosec talent doesn't want to do it (and there's not enough of it). What is the top talent spending its time on?
From my experience they work on random person projects 90% of their time
Re: XBOW, an autonomous penetration tester, has reached the top spot on HackerOne
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe that is because the article is chaotic (like any "AI" article) and does not really address the false positive issue in a well.presented manner? Or even at all? Below people are reading the tea leaves to get any clue.
There’s two whole paragraphs under a dedicated heading. I don’t think the problem is with the article here. Paragraphs reproduced below: AI can be remarkably effective at discovering a broad range of vulnerabilities—but the real challenge isn’t always detection, It’s precision. Automation has long struggled with false positives, and nowhere is this more evident than in vulnerability scanning. Tools that flag dozens o…
This doesn't say anything about many false positives they actually have. Yes, you can write other programs (that might even invoke another LLM!) to "check" the findings. That's a very obvious and reasonable thing to do. But all "vulnerability scanners", AI or not, must take steps to avoid FP -- that doesn't tell us how well they actually work.
The glaring omission here is a discussion of how many bugs the XBOW team had to manually review in order to make ~1k "valid" submissions. They state:
> It was a unique privilege to wake up each morning and review creative new exploits.
How much of every morning was spent reviewing exploits? And what % of them turned out to be real bugs? These are the critical questions that are (a) is unanswered by this post, and (b) determine the success of any product in this space imo.