From Regex Matching to Autonomous Reasoning: The Evolution of Vulnerability Detection
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Early vulnerability scanning was almost entirely pattern-based: a library of known-bad signatures, checked against incoming requests and responses. It caught what it was built to catch, and nothing outside that library.
The next generation added more context — crawling deeper, understanding application structure, correlating findings across a session. Still fundamentally rule-based, but with a wider net.
The current shift is toward systems that reason about an application the way an attacker would: forming hypotheses about what might be exploitable, testing them, and following up on whatever the response reveals — rather than checking a static list and stopping there. That’s a meaningfully different approach to the same underlying problem.
