You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.

Hello everyone, and welcome to this CyberwireX special edition.

I'm Dave Bittner.

Today we're talking about one of the toughest challenges defenders face, sorting the noise from the signal.

For many teams, vulnerability management feels like a fire hose, loud, constant, and not especially helpful.

And when everything is labeled critical, nothing really is.

Our guest today is Snihul Antani, co-founder and CEO of Horizon 3 AI.

He's lived that struggle firsthand as a CIO, deciding what not to do, asking staff to cancel family plans for patches

that didn't matter, and trying to prove security controls worked without waiting for an actual

breach to test them. That frustration pushed him to rethink how we validate security in the first

place. Instead of guessing, he decided to continuously pen-test his own environment.

And the challenges he ran into along the way ultimately led him to co-found Horizon 3 AI,

a company working to bring autonomous pen-testing and AI hackers into the mainstream.

His argument is simple.

Volns scanners tell you what might be wrong,

and tests show you what actually matters.

So today we are talking about pen testing, continuous pen testing and AI hackers and all that good stuff.

I would love to start with a little background on you.

I know you've said that the hardest part of being a CIO is deciding what not to do.

How did that come to be part of your own personal journey and kind of something that you lead with?

It's interesting. So I'm an engineer by education and trade. I did my undergrad at Purdue and computer science.

But start my career in IBM doing distributed systems, working on the mainframe,

...