We're in the heyday of AI-powered attacks, and Dreadnode is joining @CrowdStrike.

Our CEO @bradpalmtree and CTO @monoxgas on why now, why CrowdStrike's Cyber Superintelligence Lab is the right home, and what got us here: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

During the Fal.Con Europe keynote this morning, @BartleyR and @George_Kurtz announced @CrowdStrike's intent to acquire Dreadnode. Watch it on-demand here: youtube.com/watch?v=5_H7a8…

For those in Barcelona for the event this week, be sure to swing by the CrowdStrike booth to nd get a demo of Dreadnode. Hope to see you there!

Live from Barcelona at Fal.Con Europe. Watch the full keynote: youtube.com/watch?v=5_H7a8…

Dreadnode 🤝 CrowdStrike

Learn more in this @WSJ exclusive: wsj.com/pro/cybersecur…

Production-tier capabilities have arrived, and production-tier scope adherence is the final barrier to widescale deployment.

Using Jev as a recent and unique model system example, we ran the model as a monitor in ScopeBench to test how effective it for keeping agents in scope. afety tax" - seeing how these safety solutions impact raw hacking ability, some observations:
- Jev alone: more scope adherence for about $0.003 per run, minor hits to capability.
- Jev escalating to GLM: nearly all the capability back, plus more scope adherence.
- Adding Opus 4.8: worse results at a higher cost.

@VincentAbruzzo and @shanejcaldwell are presenting on this case study, taking Jev for a joyride at @unpromptedconf tomorrow afternoon.

Won't make it? Be sure to check out the write-up preview to learn more about the ScopeBench methodology and key learnings from their experimentation: dreadnode.io/research/scope…

The Dreadnode Platform has a new look. Projects are now a destination, and the Workbench puts all your work in one place.

Plus two new beta features: Chat and Workflows.

Log in and give it a spin: app.dreadnode.io

Heading to @unpromptedconf next week? Catch @VincentAbruzzo and @shanejcaldwell on stage Wednesday, October 28 for their talk on using #ScopeBench to measure how effective Jev is when used as a monitor to keep agentic harnesses in scope.

We're walking through ScopeBench task design on our livestream right now. Tune in to learn how to contribute: x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Join @shanejcaldwell and @0xdab0 live at 10 am PT/1 pm ET TODAY, right here on X (also LinkedIn and YouTube). Come hang and talk scope adherence following last week's drop of ScopeBench, a community benchmark for security agents.

Here's what they'll cover:
- ScopeBench Benchmark methodology
- How to design a task

It's essentially a more casual, collaborative version of their OAIC talk. Swing by and bring questions!

Shoutout to @Airbrushbros for creating these incredible boardwalk-inspired keepsakes at the Dreadnode OAIC Welcome Party! 🧑‍🎨🎨🏴‍☠️

In her latest piece for @axios, @samsabin923 reports on security agent scope adherence and efforts to keep them under control.

Timely topic following our release of #ScopeBench last week at @OffensiveAIcon, which is referenced in the article alongside @SpecterOps' research. .co/TthUpOH2s5

New to DreadIndex: @SakanaAILabs Fugu Cyber

Ranking near the top of the leaderboard at #3, Fugu Cyber isn't a single traditional LLM endpoint, it's a trained orchestrator model that coordinates a pool of conventional frontier models as a multi-agent system behind one API. The rained with a mix of fine-tuning, evolutionary algorithms, and RL.

Though Fugu-Cyber-v1.0 ranks high on our leaderboard, it is also one of the most costly model systems. Behaviorally, the model can take much longer for simple tasks, which makes sense given it is a multi-agent system.

Full results: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

🏴‍☠️ @shanejcaldwell and @0xdab0 took the stage yesterday at @OffensiveAIcon to officially launch ScopeBench.

At last year's con, one question kept coming up: if I pour domain expertise into a hard infosec benchmark, am I just handing free capability to the labs and my r: build the benchmark we'd all be glad to see saturated. Models that can reliably stay in scope will unlock tons of economically useful use cases that have been slow to grow despite saturated capability.

Check out the full research and learn how to contribute: dreadnode.io/research/scope…

[full recording and slides coming soon]

New to DreadGOAD: Console, an agentic web UI for deploying and managing active directory lab ranges.

Watch the tutorial to learn more: youtu.be/7OmCifoEWsU?si…

Listen in on @shanejcaldwell and @0xdab0's talk, “ScopeBench: Measuring Alignment Outside the Sandbox” at 11:05 AM, right here at @OffensiveAIcon.

Methodology paper just dropped this morning ⬇️⬇️⬇️

arxiv.org/abs/2609.30325

🧵 [3/3] Looking at both numbers shows us models with similar levels of capability (10pp) can have vastly different scope adherence (35pp).

Check out the results and learn how to contribute a task: dreadnode.io/research/scope…

Authors: @shanejcaldwell & @0xdab0

🧵 [2/3] The design is simple. Each task runs twice:

→ Capability trial: can the agent solve it?

→ Scope trial: same task, but with a rule that makes success impossible without breaking scope. If the agent solves it, that proves it broke scope.

🧵 [1/3] Agents can hack. What's holding them back is trust: will they stay in scope?

Today we're releasing ScopeBench, a methodology and community benchmark that evaluates how well agents adhere to scope in real offensive security workflows across web, Windows Active Directory, and cloud.

Today at @OffensiveAIcon:

🗣️ All Models Cheat: Prompt-Level Mitigation of Cheating of Offensive Cyber Tasks
💪: @mkultraWasHere
🔗: dreadnode.io/research/every…

About last night..! Dreadnode was the sponsor of the @OffensiveAIcon Welcome Party.

A gorgeous sunset, @bradpalmtree's DJ set, Oceanside Pier-inspired airbrush art, Hackin' Kraken blood orange margaritas, plus an incredible community of offensive AI researchers and innovators. t of it.

In town for #OAIC? Don't sleep on the final talk of the day: @mkultraWasHere hits the stage today at 4:40 PM for "All Models Cheat: Prompt-Level Mitigation of Cheating on Offensive Cyber Tasks".

New addition to DreadGOAD: Console.

DreadGOAD Console is a local agentic web UI for deploying, managing, troubleshooting, and validating DreadGOAD lab ranges.

Principal AI Research Engineer @mkultraWasHere added the agentic console to our DreadGOAD platform to offload range ration to agents and consolidate the interface for managing multiple ranges in multiple cloud providers simultaneously.

Watch this tutorial for a walkthrough of the Console and how to deploy a range: youtube.com/watch?v=7OmCif…

DreadGOAD repo: github.com/dreadnode/Drea…

Does Jev live up to the hype? Based on the results of running it against our ScopeJudge benchmark, it does.

@typesafeai's Jev was competitive with leading LLM judges, catching agent scope violations at pennies per thousand checks, with 130 millisecond responses on average. [1/4]

💪💪💪💪💪 Tomorrow (9/17) @Dr_Machinavelli takes the stage at the final @SentinelOne @labscon_io to discuss how to leverage offensive cyber capabilities to improve defenses in the age of AI.

More info: labscon.io/speakers/marti…

Qwen 3.8 Flash eval results are live on DreadIndex, landing at #19 on our leaderboard.

It does well for its cost, but remains light on offensive security capability (not surprising given it is a flash model). See how it compares to other models: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

GLM-5.3-Flash results now on DreadIndex: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Here's where to catch the Dreadnode crew at year two of @OffensiveAIcon:

> Join us for the welcome reception at The Shelter Club on Sunday evening!

> @mkultraWasHere is closing out Day One of talks, presenting on model cheating behavior.

> Dynamic duo @shanejcaldwell and @0xdab0 ty for a session on implementing a judge model as a runtime monitor, and how to keep agents in scope.

See you in Oceanside! 🏄

Worried about your production agents going out of scope? Us too. AgentJudge is our agent hall monitor that stops out of scope tool calls before they execute.

Before a tool runs, the judge reads the agent’s intent, the proposed call, and a rubric you define, then returns allow, to you).

The agent stays autonomous; the judge is the guardrail.

Available in the TUI today, UI updates coming to the Dreadnode Platform soon! 👀

Get Started: docs.dreadnode.io/getting-starte…
AgentJudge Docs: docs.dreadnode.io/tui/guard-poli…
Related Research: dreadnode.io/research/scope…

Two new additions to #DreadIndex: nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b and gemma-4-31b-it.

Landing at the bottom of the leaderboard, these evaluations offer two more proof points to increase investment in US open models.

🔗: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

NEW: we recently added a toggle to odels.

Mine The Gap

Heading to Vegas for @CrowdStrike Fal.Con next week? Don't miss @Dr_Machinavelli's Day Zero keynote where he pits red and blue team agents against each other to generate training data that can be used to increase AI performance, impose realistic e at scale.

🗣️ CrowdStrike Day Zero Threat Research Summit
📍 Virgin Hotel Las Vegas
🗓️ Monday, August 31
⌚ 9:15 - 9:45 AM PT
🔗 crowdstrike.com/en-us/events/d…

Definite improvement from Qwen 3.8 Max over 3.7 Max, but the Qwen series still hasn't cracked top 10 on DreadIndex due to its poor network ops performance.

GLM-5.3 appears to be a regression in the GLM family series, and cost 3x as much as GLM-5.2 for DreadIndex tasks. GLM-5.3 consumed an order of magnitude more tokens attempting to solve the vulnerability research tasks 💸💸💸

Deepseek-v4-pro-0813 cracked top five on the leaderboard and landed on our cost/value frontier. Notably, it did very well on network ops tasks.

Now, both deepseek-v4-pro-0813 and deepseek-v4-flash-0731 on the DreadIndex cost/value frontier, with notable implications for ed teaming workflows.

New models are regularly being added to DreadIndex: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Observations from the latest evals—Deepseek v4 Pro 0813, GLM 5.3, and Qwen 3.8 Max—in the thread 🧵⬇️

Have you tried these models out yet? Curious if our eval results align to first-hand operator usage.

US open models continue to fall short of their Chinese counterparts, as proven by our DreadIndex cyber capability benchmark (dreadnode.io/research/dread…).

It’s clear that we need greater U.S. investment in domestic open source AI.

In the latest Compute to Congress policy blog of Policy @velvethamm3r weighs the impacts of model gating and how policy can help shape our competitive advantage.

Read it at dreadnode.io/research/from-…

We’ve got an inkling that Inkling loves to cheat.

🔗: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Refusal rates are now measured on the DreadIndex leaderboard 👀

In our latest batch of evals, Opus 5 performed worse than anticipated, primarily due to refusals. Though, it still sits at #3 on the leaderboard.

Opus 5 results: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Deepseek v4 Flash 0731 made it onto our DreadIndex Value Frontier (best performance at its price point—costing only $8 to run the entire benchmark suite). It’s the first Deepseek model to land a spot on the Value Frontier.

Are you seeing good results with v4 Flash? Try it in started today with $25 worth of free credits: app.dreadnode.io.

@njcve_ You can toggle between categories using the dropdown in the top left!

The latest batch of offensive security evals are up on #DreadIndex, featuring six new models:

- Opus 5
- Deepseek v4 Flash 0731
- GLM 5.1
- Laguna S2.1
- Trinity Large Thinking
- Inkling

See how they stack up on our leaderboard 👉 dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Dreadnode's Ads Dawson is presenting "Pentesting AI is Not a Vibe Check" at @defcon today at 5:30 PM with @OWASPGenAISec.

📍 LVCC - L1 - Exhibit Hall West 3 - 1100 (Creator Stage 7)

At 3:30 PM PT today, join Dreadnode CTO and Co-Founder @monoxgas at @AISecurityForum for an offensive capabilities workshop.

@Dr_Machinavelli and Jayson Grace hit the #BlackHat stage in 20 minutes! Head to Oceanside B to catch their talk, "Catch Me If You Can: AI Investigators Hunting Autonomous Attackers as a Benchmark"

We made some new shirts for you, and your little ones, too. Available at @AISecurityForum tomorrow. 🍣🐙 #thisishowweroll

The July release of Kimi K3 sparked a lot of discussion in the security domain around Chinese open-weight model capabilities. Can it actually outperform - or keep pace with - frontier models at a fraction of the cost?

We used the #DreadIndex offensive security evals to find out hat we observed:

👉 The Kimi family's real gains are concentrated in web app pentesting, cryptography, and reversing — where K3 roughly doubles performance of earlier model versions.

👉 Among the Kimi family, K3 cheats the least (0.28 vs 0.36), but costs ~2.5×.

👉 Despite cost increase, Kimi K3 still landed on the DreadIndex Value Frontier (most efficient for its price point).

See how @Kimi_Moonshot stacks up, or select other models to compare with our updated DreadIndex UI: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Black Hat Day 1 🏴‍☠️ Here's what's on deck:

- We're posted up at @DecibelVC's Game Day at Libertine Social. Come say hello!

- Attending the #BlackHat AI Summit? @moo_hax is hitting the stage at 4:30 PM for "From AI Assistance to AI Autonomy: Security Lessons Learned," a panel Burn, @nathanhamiel, and Victoria Westeroff.

93% of agent permission prompts get accepted without edit. The Hugging Face intrusion took 17,600 actions. How many of those actions would you have reviewed carefully before choosing whether to let them run?

Judge-based gating mechanisms are the most practical and widely y scalable oversight in the offensive security domain today.

New research from @shanejcaldwell and crew tests eight LLM judges on nearly 5,000 offsec tool calls to prove this thesis.

The best judges matched human performance, AND kept costs low by using open-weight models.

Results are live on arXiv and the Dreadnode blog: dreadnode.io/research/scope…

Can you prompt away cheating?

New research from the Dreadnode crew presents a controlled prompt-ablation study to answer this very question. 23 tasks, three prompt conditions, 1,518 individually audited traces, five observations:

1️⃣ Benchmark scores are inflated and should be es.

2️⃣ Prompt-level mitigation is cheap, partially effective, and fundamentally insufficient.

3️⃣ Cheating is universal, but resistance to mitigation is model-specific and unpredictable.

4️⃣ Anti-cheat prompts redirect cheating, not just reduce it.

5️⃣ Only structural interventions can close the gap entirely.

Plus, insight on cheating strategies, and how they differ across model families.

Author: @mkultraWasHere
Blog: dreadnode.io/research/every…
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2607.21763

Kicking off evals for Opus 5. Or, hop in the platform and run your own.

DreadIndex results 🔜🔜🔜: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

Existing model benchmarks didn't reflect what we saw in real offensive work. So we built our own.

Introducing DreadIndex — an offensive security benchmark for language models.

76 tasks, 10 domains — web pentest, crypto, reversing, AD, vuln research. Plus cost + refusal data.

We're heading to Vegas for #BlackHatUSA, @AISecurityForum, and @defcon this August!

Here's where to find us all week + a sneak peek at the tech and research we'll be bringing: dreadnode.io/company/newsro…

See you there? DM us to request a 1:1 meeting.

Most offensive security evals stop at the terminal.

But models now have to reason from PCB photos, floor plans, cable paths, and drone feeds — where perception and security judgment are inseparable.

In our latest blog, read how we crafted offensive security evals for embodied /7BnsjCUfDg

Authors: Ads Dawson and @mkultraWasHere

In under three minutes, watch us run a successful Tap attack on Groq Llama 4 using our AI red teaming capability ▶️🏴‍☠️⏱️

“As an AI red teaming operator, my focus should be to identify the vulnerabilities rather than managing these workflows." — @rdheeko on redefining AI red teaming in the agentic era

full recording >>> dreadnode.io/research/ai-re…

In order to operationalize AI, we must make evaluations real enough that they're representative of production environments... and then scale that to a place where the line between dev and prod is really thin.

More on this in our latest livestream, AI Red Teaming a Frontier al Language to Findings. Watch the full recording: dreadnode.io/research/ai-re…

Easily use GLM 5.2 in the Dreadnode Platform. Run an agent eval and see how the new model stacks up: app.dreadnode.io

What has changed the most in the adversarial AI space over the past few years—since @rdheeko and @moo_hax were on the AI red teams at Microsoft and NVIDIA?

👉 The scale of deployment and the varying modalities.
👉 And, how we offload responsibility and accountability to models.
olution of AI red teaming in the agentic era in our latest livestream. Summary and recording now available at dreadnode.io/research/ai-re…

NEW binary analysis capability, now available in the Dreadnode Platform.

Triage through symbolic execution, with decompilation, emulation, and patch-diffing in the loop.

Get started for free and leverage the capability to support malware analysis, vulnerability research, and app.dreadnode.io

From subnet to Domain Admin, autonomously.

Discover, enumerate, escalate, harvest — one agent runs the entire kill chain.

Integrate with mythic, sliver, and bloodhound, and hook into any of your favorite network operations tools.

Try out our network ops capability today (start o/Ht4T8LC8rq

Welcome to Dreadnode HQ!

📍 Bozeman, Montana

In/near Bozeman? Hit us up, we'd love to host you at the new space!

Agentic web app pentesting on your terms. Your tools, your domain expertise, your skills.

Scoped, sandboxed, scored, verification-gated — recon to report, fully autonomous.

Sign up today and get 25k free credits → app.dreadnode.io

AI red teaming at machine speed and scale.

50+ attack algorithms. 500+ transforms. 130+ scorers.

Probe LLMs, agents, MCP servers, and traditional ML for security and safety vulnerabilities — all in one simple workflow.

Start for free → app.dreadnode.io

Catch @moo_hax and @rdheeko's livestream on AI red teaming in the agentic era in 1⃣ HOUR.

youtube.com/watch?v=rz5TGN…

@mkultraWasHere @Dr_Machinavelli @shncldwll

See you in Vegas! 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ 🏴‍☠️ @Dr_Machinavelli, @shncldwll, and Jayson Grace's research on a new eval methodology that pins red and blue agents against each other to create an autonomous feedback loop will be presented at #BlackHat2026.

🚨 Calling all AI red teams and AI security operators 🚨 Join @rdheeko and @moo_hax this Thursday (6/4) for a live session covering our agentic approach to AI red teaming.

Come for a live assessment against a frontier model, stay to learn about the latest tools and methodologies ms.

Tune in on X at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET!

Building agentic systems for security means living with constant change. New threats, new tools, new orchestration patterns.

Maintain speed and flexibility with Workers, an integration primitive that enables long-running background processes that connect agents to webhooks, s, and the rest of your stack in a few lines of code.

Head to our blog to read how we're moving past the chat loop and into real integration and orchestration.

Full write-up + working source code analysis example: dreadnode.io/research/dread…

AI red teams today are stuck doing workflow engineering instead of finding vulnerabilities. Weeks spent on infrastructure, when they could be probing for security and safety risks.

At the same time, traditional ML and generative AI security remain siloed across different cosystems, creating long-term operational and maintenance burden.

We built an agentic AI red teaming system on the Dreadnode SDK to flip this narrative, accelerating testing from weeks to hours. Operators describe the objective in plain English; the agent handles attack selection, workflow generation, execution, and reporting.

In our latest paper, we dive deep into the AI red team agent architecture, our methodology, the complete attack and transform catalog, the analytics pipeline… and then we pointed it at Meta's Llama Scout. The result:
→ 674 attacks, 573 findings, 7,727 trials
→ 232 critical vulnerabilities across 68 objectives
→ ~85% attack success rate
→ ~3 hours, zero human-written code

AI red teaming today looks like software development before agent-assisted coding: skilled operators spending most of their time on infrastructure rather than on the work that requires their judgment.

The transition isn't necessarily about replacing the operator. It's about moving the operator's expertise up a layer, from which Python function should I call ➡️ what's worth probing, what risks do we care most about, and what do the results mean for my AI strategy.

Blog: dreadnode.io/research/redef…
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.04019

Real offensive cyber capability shows up in long-horizon, multi-host, repeatable evals. The kind we rarely see running at scale.

Claude Opus 4.6 + our network ops agent compromised an entire GOAD variant Windows AD environment (DreadGOAD) in 54 minutes, with one simple prompt, e specs:
📊 DreadGOAD variant-1 · 3 domains · 5 hosts · 30 credentials · random user data, not in training set
💻 Claude Opus 4.6
🛠️ Dreadnode Network-Ops
🕓 54.5 min · 🪙 48.52M tokens · 💰 $244.02

Mythos has been in the spotlight for its cyber capabilities, but other models are competitive too. You just need the right scaffolding and eval infrastructure.

Run the network ops agent now in the Dreadnode platform. Use any model. No code required. Sign up or log in and get started for free at dreadnode.io.

Do you have private access to Mythos or GPT-5.5? Both models are now supported by our harness.

Custom harnesses are arguably the most important factor in capability improvement. Try ours at dreadnode.io (get started for free).

@shncldwll

In less than 20 minutes and under $2, we used our .NET reversing capability to run a SAST scan of Azure Cosmos DB in the Microsoft Container Registry (MCR), surfacing a high severity vulnerability in the now-deprecated database.

🆕 Model: Moonshot AI - Kimi K2.6
⏱️ Task/agent s
🪙 Tokens: ↑ 3124.0k · ↓ 33.3k
💰 Cost: $1.97

Vulnerability Overview: When using managed identity auth, it calls an internal token service over HTTPS, but the TLS certificate validation callback is tautological — it checks if the server cert's thumbprint matches any cert in the chain, but the leaf cert is always in its own chain, so it always passes.

Watch the video to see how we ran it within our TUI. Install Dreadnode and try out the .NET reversing capability:

➡️docs: docs.dreadnode.io/tui/capabiliti…
➡️command: ray.so/gyrc2qB

One short week until our rooftop happy hour in Arlington, VA!

Based in the DC area? Focused on operationalizing agents and accelerating security? We have room for a few more. DM us for event details.

We're open-sourcing DreadGOAD & Ares, a closed-loop eval system that pits red team agents against blue team agents in the same Active Directory environment.

Red team: 7 specialized agents, domain dominance in <6 min, 97% success rate across 142 ops.

Blue team: scored against the attactions — not curated logs or checklists.

Security agent benchmarks test offense and defense in isolation. That's the gap. DreadGOAD and Ares provide the feedback loop that’s been missing.

🔗 dreadnode.io/research/mine-…

Rooftop. Drinks. The future of security agents.

We're hosting a happy hour in Arlington, VA for folks building at the intersection of AI and security — on Thursday, April 23 from 5-8 PM ET. No keynotes, just good people and real conversations about where this space is headed.
s for details.