Anthropic's decision to delay its latest frontier model – citing its unprecedented capability for uncovering zero-days – feels like a defining moment for offensive security. However, Claude Mythos fits within a long-running trend that YesWeHack has already been adapting to: the automation of coding and exploitation of flaws within code.
Unified offsec for the age of AI
Ballooning attack surfaces and threat actors’ growing capabilities drove our evolution into an Offensive Security and Exposure Management platform. This recently announced approach is built around a continuous four-step cycle:
This model incorporates Autonomous Pentest (comprehensive asset discovery and automated checks for active threats), Continuous Pentesting (adding in-depth manual testing) and vulnerability management (unified workflows to aggregate and manage findings from external sources). 🐞
What it means for Bug Bounty
Our flagship offering also remains a cornerstone. But doesn’t the Mythos moment spell the end for Bug Bounty? On the contrary: the biggest AI labs themselves, including Anthropic, continue to invest heavily in Bug Bounty Programs. Another record-breaking year for Google’s Bug Bounty Program attests to the effectiveness of this continuous, scalable and in-depth form of testing. ✅
Two viral takes explain why. First, tech journalist Jon Martindale pointed out on Tom’s Hardware that many Mythos discoveries were non-exploitable “functionality flaws” or neutralised by defence-in-depth protections. Second, YesWeHack-registered hunter Aituglo has argued that “our expertise still lets us steer AI toward the right lead, to know where to dig.” The ethical hacker (who we interviewed recently) envisions augmented hunters finding “complex bugs faster than ever” while “an ocean of noise generated by poorly piloted agents” undermines broader security efforts. “The platforms that figure out how to filter that noise will survive.”
In other words, we still need expert testers to steer LLMs in productive directions and convey actionable findings to security teams. With AI supercharging the proliferation of both exploitable and ‘slop’ vulnerabilities, expert validation and prioritisation become more, not less, important.
Readily available human support also remains key to unblocking Bug Bounty bottlenecks: as Banco Galicia’s cybersecurity manager said of YesWeHack’s triage team in our latest customer story, ‘When we ask for help, it’s instant’. 🧠
Experts in the loop
Our hunters are not being outcompeted by LLMs – they’re being augmented by them. “Everyone is getting a Claude Max subscription, launching it on all their targets, white box or black box, with MCPs, Chrome instances connected to a proxy to intercept and replay requests,” he wrote. This chimes with survey findings published in our 2026 report, which revealed that AI tools now part of 91% of hunters’ workflow, with 94% observing tangible benefits: faster bug discovery, more complex vulnerabilities or and better pattern recognition across large attack surfaces.
With bad guys equally augmented, exploitation timelines keep shrinking. In-the-wild evidence continues to reinforce the value of risk-based prioritisation and rapid detection of actively exploited vulnerabilities. First, a recent Flashpoint report highlights how autonomous systems are substantially lowering the barrier to entry for attackers, enabling exploitation within hours rather than days. Cisco Talos, meanwhile, has similarly observed faster exploitation timelines, citing December's ‘React2Shell’ (CVE-2025-55182), the maximum-severity RCE, as a case in point. YesWeHack crafted an automated checkpoint for this CVE within 24 hours of its disclosure in December, with exploitable instances validated on customer assets within minutes. ⏱️ Relatedly, we recently documented the target of another checkpoint, a critical auth bypass in WordPress Azure AD SSO. These automated checkpoints validate your attack surface against actively exploited vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and subdomain takeover risks.
Cybersecurity fundamentals still apply – only more so
Although Mythos has been described by some experts as a “nothingburger” driven by hype, the model appears to represent a genuine leap in attack capabilities – and future models will be more powerful still. Yet the expert consensus is that cybersecurity fundamentals hold – if organisations treat them as a strategic priority rather than a maintenance task. This includes consistent adherence to cyber hygiene essentials and rapid validation, prioritisation and remediation of vulnerabilities, informed by business context.
Prioritising vulnerabilities based on real-world risk is key to our model, with findings priority-scored by severity, exploitability and asset criticality. It's helpful if analysts who understand the technical implications of such evaluations can convey them in business-friendly language that lands in the boardroom, as this Help Net Security video on ‘the art of making technical risk make sense to executives’ points out. 🧠
Augmentation not just automation
A recent Splunk report found CISOs optimistic about AI’s productivity gains but cautious about risk and liability. “The data paints a picture of autonomous agents sifting through endless alerts and logs, freeing up human analysts to focus on critical thinking and strategic analysis,” it says. “Crucially, CISOs expect AI agents to boost their security teams’ efficiency and accuracy, not replace analysts outright. In fact, a resounding 60% of CISOs disagree with the statement “agentic AI will replace some level 1 security team functions.” We agree that humans must be kept in the loop. 🧠
New player in the CVE ecosystem
AI is also compounding pressure on the CVE Program and National Vulnerability Database (NVD). According to Cybersecurity Dive, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cannot keep up with the deluge of new CVEs that they’re tasked with analysing and enriching with further information. That work is “very labour-intensive” and “not scalable to the amount of CVEs that we’re getting in there. We’re fighting a losing battle,” said Jon Boyens, the acting chief of NIST’s Computer Security Division. At RSAC 2026, experts expressed concern about the CVE Program’s over-reliance on federal money after the near-lapse of its funding last year. Their disquiet had apparently not been allayed by CISA acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity’s subsequent claim that “there was no funding issue, but rather a contract administration issue that was resolved prior to a contract lapse”. 💰
One upshot of the 2025 funding crisis was the emergence of a European rival to the CVE Program. The European Union (which incidentally is running multiple Bug Bounty Programs with YesWeHack) recently launched the Global CVE Allocation System (GCVE). Dark Reading has reported on the industry response to the initiative. 🇪🇺
The need for a well-resourced CVE Program has arguably never been clearer, with the number of new vulnerabilities soaring year-on-year over the past decade. Now FIRST has forecast another record CVE surge in 2026. With security researchers warning that most won’t translate into real-world attacks, one security expert advises CISOs to “double down on prioritisation” and “expect more noise, not more attackers”. 📈
Combatting AI slop
After a popular open-source data transfer tool called time on its Bug Bounty Program over frustrations with AI slop reports, we’d like to flag our own efforts to combat the problem. Namely, we now have a ‘program spamming and AI slop’ violation in our platform code of conduct, violations of which can result in a platform ban. Our triage team also offers a layer of validation to remove AI slop and other ‘noise’ for fully managed programs. 🧹
Having separated the signal from the noise in terms of offsec news of note, we still have a few items of interest to highlight:
🔐 Supply chain blast: Top npm package backdoored to drop dirty RAT on dev machines – Carly Page, The Register
🔐 The CISO’s guide to responding to shadow AI – CSO
🔐 Why cyber defenders need to be ready for frontier AI – Paul J & Alan Steer, UK National Cyber Security Centre
🔐 Google: The quantum apocalypse is coming sooner than we thought – Maria Korolov, CSO
🔐 Global security testing market to grow 24.6% CAGR by 2031 – MarketsandMarkets on PR Newswire
🔐 APIs are the new perimeter: Here’s how CISOs are securing them – Bill Doerrfeld on CSO
🤘 Meet the YesWeHack Team 🤘
We’ll finish up, as usual, with our events schedule. If you happen to be in the countries or regions in question, then we hope you’ll consider coming to see us at the following events. We’ll happily answer questions about, or show you a demo of, our Offensive Security and Exposure Management platform:
📍Boston Official Cybersecurity Summit | Boston, US | 6 May
📍Bsides Tampa | Florida, US | 16 May
📍Infosecurity Europe | London, UK | booth F139 | 2-4 June
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Are you a bug hunter or do you have an interest in ethical hacking? Check out our ethical hacking-focused sister newsletter, Bug Bounty Bulletin – offering hunting advice, interviews with hunters and CTF-style challenges, among other things.
