London-based offensive security startup CodeWall Ltd. officially launched today with $4 million in new funding to give enterprises such as banks autonomous artificial intelligence agents that attack them the way an outside hacker would.

CodeWall begins each engagement with no credentials or inside knowledge of the target. Several agents, each built for a different kind of job, work on it at the same time. According to the company, whatever one of them finds is logged to a common investigation graph, so a weak spot in a single application can become another agent’s route into connected systems and data.

Customers see each completed attack path step by step, with the evidence attached. The agents go back in whenever new systems come online or a fix is applied, and they keep to whatever scope the customer has authorized. Founder and Chief Executive Paul Price calls that ongoing testing “a permanent capability,” and CodeWall is pitching the service as a replacement for the penetration tests most enterprises commission once or twice a year.

Earlier this year CodeWall turned its agents on the Big Three management consulting firms. At McKinsey & Co. Inc., an agent with no credentials gained read and write access to the production database behind the firm’s Lilli AI platform within two hours. Research published in the weeks that followed found exposed databases at Boston Consulting Group Inc. and Bain & Co. Inc.

Each firm fixed its flaws within days of being told. A McKinsey spokesperson told The Register that a third-party forensics investigation found no evidence that client data had been accessed by CodeWall or any other unauthorized party.

CodeWall argues that defenders now need the kind of automation attackers already have. Over the summer, cloud security company Sysdig Inc. documented what it said was the first ransomware operation run from start to finish by an autonomous AI agent.

Price said enterprises “shouldn’t have to wait for a real attacker to find out whether their defenses hold.” Each customer, in his words, gets “an attacker that keeps looking for a way in.”

Osney Capital led the pre-seed round, with InReach Ventures, Antler Global Ltd. and angel investors participating. Paul Wilkes, a partner at Osney Capital, said attackers have held the advantage for years because they can keep probing for another way in. In his view, having an attacker working for an enterprise will one day be “as fundamental as having defenses in place.”

Most of the money will go toward letting the agents reach more parts of an enterprise’s environment. The platform is also getting workflows for verifying and remediating what the agents find, and CodeWall is hiring in London across its technical and commercial teams.

Image: Codewall