The IT Nerd

BreachLock, the only offensive security platform combining agentic AI-powered autonomous penetration testing, expert-led, agentic AI-accelerated penetration testing services, and continuous Attack Surface Management (ASM), today announced the release of its 2026 Penetration Testing Intelligence Report, the company’s fifth annual analysis of real-world security findings across global organizations. Based on data from 4,970 penetration tests and 531,770 individual security findings, the report provides a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerabilities, attack patterns, and emerging risks shaping the cybersecurity landscape in 2026 and beyond.

Among the report’s most significant findings is the emergence of AI as a major enterprise attack surface. BreachLock’s inaugural AI penetration testing dataset found that 100% of AI applications tested contained vulnerabilities aligned with the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. Prompt injection (LLM01) was the most prevalent and impactful finding in the dataset, present in 28% of tested applications.

The report also identifies a sharp shift in how attackers are targeting web applications. Insecure Design and business logic flaws (OWASP A04) rose from 8% to 16% of findings year over year, a trend-defining increase in the 2026 web application dataset. Testers observed attackers exploiting race conditions in checkout flows, escalating privileges through parameter manipulation, and bypassing approval workflows outright. These issues do not appear on automated scanner reports. Finding them requires testers who understand how an application is supposed to behave and can reason through how that logic can be subverted.

Cloud environments produced the highest concentration of severe risk in the dataset. Cloud security audits carried a Critical finding rate of 1.34%, thirteen times higher than the rate found in web application testing, driven largely by exposed S3 buckets, leaking Lambda functions, and disabled GuardDuty monitoring.

Mobile applications showed a similarly narrow but severe risk profile. Hardcoded credentials in iOS applications accounted for 97% of all Critical mobile findings this year. These credentials can be extracted with free, publicly available tools in minutes, and credential-related vulnerabilities continue to be a top attack vector in headlines this year.

The report also highlights industry-specific risk trends across manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, retail, and technology organizations.

BreachLock’s 2026 report is designed to help security leaders benchmark their programs against real-world offensive security data while providing actionable recommendations for reducing exposure through continuous testing, adversarial validation, cloud governance, mobile application security, and AI security assessments.

Download the BreachLock 2026 Penetration Testing Intelligence Report or read the blog for highlights.

BreachLock announced today that BreachLock AEV customers can now get human-verified results on any autonomous penetration testing engagement. One toggle adds a certified BreachLock penetration testing expert as the final checkpoint to review every objective, finding, and vulnerability, effectively eliminating false positives.

BreachLock Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) is the company’s agentic AI-powered autonomous pentesting solution trained on 40,000+ real-world penetration testing engagements. Its skilled agents think, adapt, and safely chain exploits across network and web environments in production the way a senior pentester would.

Customers rely on AEV to continuously prove which risks are exploitable and can be chained together with supporting evidence and targeted mitigation actions. Nothing about how AEV runs, exploits, or proves exploitability changes when the toggle is on. Human-verified results add an optional final checkpoint on top, for organizations that want expert accountability behind the deliverable, supplied by BreachLock rather than their own team.

Human-verified results are built for security teams that launch autonomous penetration testing engagements on their own schedule. BreachLock Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) remains the expert-led, AI-accelerated option, in which certified in-house pentesters direct the engagement, go deeper on business logic flaws and complex attack paths, and validate every finding by default. With AEV, the agents run the assessment, and the customer chooses whether a certified expert verifies the results before delivery.

Human-verified results are available now to all BreachLock AEV customers and can be requested with a single toggle, labeled “Get Human-Verified Results,” during engagement setup. BreachLock outlines the new human-verified results feature in a new blog post.

To learn more about BreachLock AEV and the company’s suite of offensive security solutions, visit BreachLock.com.