The offensive security world is entering a new phase—and this time, AI isn’t just powering the adversaries. Synack, best known for blending human pentesters with crowdsourced expertise, is rolling out Sara Pentest, a new agentic AI product that automates key parts of penetration testing and dramatically reduces the time it takes to discover exploitable vulnerabilities.
Built on the Synack Autonomous Red Agent (Sara) architecture, Sara Pentest promises to shrink the exposure window from the industry-standard months to mere days. The idea is simple but disruptive: AI agents execute reconnaissance, attack attempts, and verification loops at machine speed, while humans step in for specialized, complex tasks that still require intuition and creativity.
In a landscape where attackers are already experimenting with open-source AI agents for offensive campaigns, the timing couldn’t be more critical.
The New Offensive Security Equation
Traditional penetration testing has long struggled with a paradox: it’s essential, but it’s slow, expensive, and bounded by human availability. Even the best teams can only test so many assets at once, and most organizations operate with a backlog of infrastructure, web apps, and APIs that never get fully examined.
Synack’s Sara Pentest attempts to flip that script. Instead of waiting weeks or months for pentester windows, organizations can launch tests instantly—whenever a new host comes online, a Zero Day drops, or a major release hits production.
Dr. Mark Kuhr, Synack’s CTO and co-founder, framed it bluntly:
“Humans and AI agents working together is the future of offensive security. Organizations can save time and money—and keep ahead of malicious hackers—who are also using AI to scale their operations.”
It’s not fearmongering; it’s the reality of the modern attack surface. AI-enhanced adversaries are fast. Defenders need tooling that moves faster.
How Sara Pentest Works
Sara Pentest isn’t a monolithic bot—it’s a coordinated system of specialized agents that mirror the workflow of human pentesters.
1. Reconnaissance Agent
Maps the environment, identifies open ports, active services, exposed endpoints, and web applications. Essentially, it builds the attack surface blueprint.
2. Attack Agents
A team of agents attempt exploits the same way human pentesters do—probing weaknesses, attempting known attack paths, and exploring misconfigurations.
3. Verification Agents
Re-test findings to minimize false positives. This step is crucial since AI-generated results can drift into speculative territory without tight guardrails.
4. Human Triage
Every exploitable vulnerability is verified by Synack’s analyst team. This hybrid step ensures the findings are accurate before hitting customer dashboards.
The output is bundled into a downloadable report, complete with verified exploitable findings and remediation insights.
This hybrid-AI pipeline is the core differentiator. Purely automated scanners can be noisy. Purely human approaches don’t scale. Synack is betting that AI and humans working together becomes the new gold standard.
Why Enterprises Will Care
Organizations today face a brutal trade-off: expand pentesting coverage or keep costs under control. Most can’t do both. Sara Pentest aims to break that trade-off entirely.
Here’s what changes:
Reduce Cost
AI agents take on the repetitive, routine testing work. Human pentesters focus on high-skill, high-impact tasks. This is the classic “shift expert time to expert work” model—finally applied to offensive security.
Act Quickly
No more waiting for a pentest window. Sara Pentest can be triggered instantly. This matters tremendously when Zero Day vulnerabilities drop, as organizations scramble to validate exposure.
Test at Scale
Need to test 100 assets? 1,000? More? AI agents don’t get tired, don’t have limited schedules, and don’t sleep through global time zones.
Guide Human Pentesters
Use agents to run initial sweeps, then point human testers toward confirmed vulnerabilities and complex attack paths. This pre-filtering is a massive time-saver for overworked security teams.
Improve Coverage
With machine-speed reconnaissance and attack loops, Sara Pentest can explore asset classes that traditional pentests often skip due to time or budget constraints.
In short: faster, cheaper, broader, and more responsive.
The Bigger Picture: AI Is Changing Offensive Security
The offensive side of cybersecurity is undergoing a transformation. AI-powered tools, autonomous agents, and automated exploit frameworks are no longer niche research projects—they’re being used in the wild.
Synack’s strategy acknowledges two converging realities:
- Attackers are becoming faster and more automated.
Open-source AI agents can already chain actions, generate payloads, and analyze responses at speeds that overwhelm manual defenders. - Defenders need offensive visibility as fast as attackers move.
Testing once a year—or even quarterly—doesn’t cut it when new exposures appear daily.
Sara Pentest brings AI into the defensive offensive stack, giving organizations a counterweight to machine-speed adversaries.
A Platform Built for Hybrid Offensive Security
Synack’s broader platform combines:
- Crowdsourced human pentesters
- Offensive security automation
- Agentic AI workflows
- Detailed reporting and triage
Sara Pentest is the next iteration of this strategy: give AI the first pass, give humans the final say, and give enterprises the ability to scale testing without scaling headcount.
What Synack is doing mirrors broader shifts in the industry:
- Secure-by-design requirements are rising.
- Attack surfaces are expanding.
- Zero Day response times must shrink.
- AI governance is colliding with security modernization.
With Sara Pentest, Synack positions itself not as a replacement for human pentesters, but as the automated force multiplier they need.
The Future of Pentesting: Faster, Autonomous, Hybrid
What Sara Pentest represents isn’t just a product launch—it’s a directional signal. Offensive security is moving from periodic, human-only engagements to continuous, AI-augmented cycles. Enterprises will increasingly run machine-speed assessments all the time and bring in human specialists for difficult, creative, or high-risk scenarios.
That’s not a downgrade of human expertise—it’s a reallocation.
Synack’s message is clear: AI isn’t just another scanning tool. Used correctly, it redefines what “coverage” means in cybersecurity.
As organizations try to stay ahead of attackers who are already experimenting with AI-powered offensive techniques, tools like Sara Pentest may soon become standard operating equipment.
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