THE FUTURE OF THREAT EMULATION: BUILDING AI AGENTS THAT HUNT LIKE CLOUD ADVERSARIES

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Agentic AI unlocks a powerful utility for emulating the methodology of advanced cloud pentesters or threat actors in a context-aware method that goes beyond traditional automated tooling. This post demonstrates how an agent can be provided with “tools” or functions that it can utilize first to enumerate the permissions a given IAM user has, iteratively identify privilege escalation exploits, and then use other tools to carry out the privilege escalation. The post also includes a scenario in which the agent successfully discovers the full attack chain that an adversary could use to launch an S3 ransomware attack.