Hack The Box launches AI Range Enterprise Edition to test whether AI agents can do the job

The release addresses what the company describes as a gap in how security teams vet agents. Hack The Box said an agent can be put into production after a strong benchmark result or a vendor test without ever being checked against the work it will handle day to day, a level of scrutiny that human staff in the same role normally receive. The company said an agent's performance can also drift after deployment as the model underneath it is updated.

Hack The Box launched the original AI Range last December and said AI labs, government customers and hyperscalers have been testing agents on it since then. The enterprise edition extends the same testing to corporate security teams, with each agent appraised against the role it has been given.

The appraisal method, called Agentic Worker Competence, produces a score for an agent's assigned role and a pass-or-fail mark in each environment it works through, with results tracked over time. Hack The Box said it adds new environments on a regular basis as fresh vulnerabilities and attack patterns turn up in the wild. Customers can rerun the appraisal whenever an agent, its model or its data changes.

Chief Product Officer Gerasimos Marketos described the process as "connect the agent, assign it a role and let it work." The platform logs how the agent copes with each task on its own, he said, and security leaders can use those results to decide what work an agent is ready for.

The launch also covers the people who work alongside agents. Founder and Chief Executive Haris Pylarinos said leaders need "confidence in both sides of the workforce" as AI takes on more cybersecurity tasks.

At launch, penetration tester and security operations center analyst are the only two roles with AI-augmented versions. In the analyst version, practitioners lean on AI to review alerts in realistic scenarios, and whatever the AI recommends doing next is theirs to evaluate.

Grading for those roles runs through Agentic Operator Competence Scoring. The scenarios test whether a practitioner catches errors in an agent's reasoning and knows when to step in, and they also score holding back, based on whether someone lets AI-driven work run when it does not need correcting.

AI Range Enterprise Edition and the two AI-augmented roles are available now, with more cybersecurity roles planned for the coming months.

Hack The Box is a venture capital-backed startup that raised $55 million in a Series B round led by The Carlyle Group Inc. in 2023, with Paladin Capital Group and Marathon Venture Capital also participating. The company says it has more than 800 enterprise customers and a community of more than 4 million cybersecurity professionals.

Editor's Summary

Hack The Box has extended its AI Range testing platform to enterprise security teams, scoring AI agents against the specific roles they fill and adding graded scenarios for the human analysts and penetration testers who work beside them. The move targets a gap the company identifies between benchmark performance and day-to-day reliability, and it gives security leaders a way to reassess agents as models, data and attack patterns change.