Sean Heelan: “We should start assuming that in the near future the limiting factor on a state or group’s ability to develop exploits, break into networks, escalate privileges and remain in those networks, is going to be their token throughput over time, and not the number of hackers they employ.”
translated by AI, reviewed by the editors
· Cybersecurity · vulnerability researcher, on his blog, summing up an experiment in which AI agents wrote more than 40 exploits
original
“In this post I’m going to focus on the main conclusion I’ve drawn from this work, which is that we should prepare for the industrialisation of many of the constituent parts of offensive cyber security. We should start assuming that in the near future the limiting factor on a state or group’s ability to develop exploits, break into networks, escalate privileges and remain in those networks, is going to be their token throughput over time, and not the number of hackers they employ. Nothing is certain, but we would be better off having wasted effort thinking through this scenario and have it not happen, than be unprepared if it does.”— Sean Heelan, sean.heelan.io, 18.01.2026 ↗
backs
Fuzzing+Large language model → AI vulnerability discovery (2024)
verification
✓ checked against the source
The original is given verbatim and only as an excerpt — as much as the meaning needs; “[…]” marks a cut. The translation is ours.
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