Theori Drops Consulting, Training to Bet All on AI Hacking Platform | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #hacker

Cybersecurity firm Theori will shut down its consulting and training businesses this year and concentrate its resources on automating vulnerability analysis with artificial intelligence. The plan calls for sharply reducing the share of labor-intensive consulting, long its main revenue source, and rebuilding the business around Xint, its own AI-powered penetration testing platform.

In an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily on the 7th, Theori CEO Park Se-joon said the company had “decided to focus on services and products that automate penetration testing and vulnerability analysis with AI.” Park added, “We have nearly completed the reorganization over the past month, and we plan to align the priorities of every business line with Xint going forward.” The CEO also said, “Over the past year we saw firsthand what changes occur when customers use Xint, and we concluded that this is the direction the field must take.”

Launched by Theori in October last year, Xint is an AI-based autonomous penetration testing platform that protects a company’s entire security lifecycle, from development and operations through continuous monitoring. With AI-driven hacking risks mounting recently, Theori decided to put more weight behind Xint.

As a result, the company is scaling back its existing consulting business, in which white-hat hackers accessed client systems directly to find vulnerabilities and carried out penetration tests and compliance reviews. “Consulting services, which have been our main revenue source, will from now on be offered to Xint customers as an add-on,” Park said. “The business of generating revenue from consulting alone will effectively end at the end of this year.” The company also plans to wind down the paid portion of its cybersecurity training platform by year-end and offer only its existing content free of charge.

Behind the restructuring lies a judgment that AI will rapidly replace much of the work now done by white-hat hackers. “Right now there are clearly areas where professional hackers can go deeper and be more creative than AI,” Park said. “But if you embed into AI the processes and workflows that people used to handle manually, a substantial share of it can ultimately be automated.” He predicted, “AI will inevitably take on speeds and scopes that human hackers find hard to reach, and in the end teams that use AI well will have the greater competitive edge.”

Theori will also widen Xint’s automation scope in stages. At present, the platform analyzes vulnerabilities in a system after a customer asks for a specific target to be examined. Going forward, the company plans to have AI automatically find externally exposed assets and screen for high-risk attack surfaces to test. The feature was originally slated for release in the first half of next year, but the company moved the target to the end of this year as client demand grew following recent hacking incidents at financial firms.

“Next year we intend to develop a feature that automatically verifies, after a vulnerability is found, whether actual intrusion and lateral movement across an internal network are possible,” Park said. “The era of humans doing the hacking is already nearing its end,” he added. “Theori’s course from here will revolve around Xint, and this restructuring is the opening act.”