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Posted by Phil Alsop on 04 November 2025 at 2:42 pm
  • news

Bugcrowd, a frontrunner in crowdsourced cybersecurity, has announced the acquisition of Mayhem Security, known for its AI-centered offensive security innovations. This acquisition aims to pioneer a human-in-the-loop, AI-driven security testing platform to advance the sector's standards.

In an era of increasingly complex attack surfaces, driven by rapid software delivery and extended APIs, traditional security measures find themselves lagging. Vulnerabilities are often detected post-deployment, leaving potential weaknesses in live environments. To tackle these ever-evolving threats efficiently, a novel approach is necessary, merging AI's scalability and precision with human expertise.

The fusion of Mayhem's AI automation with Bugcrowd's crowdsourced testing represents a new paradigm in vulnerability detection and resolution. Organisations will benefit from automated, proactive security measures applied throughout the development process, thanks to virtually interference-free assessments that uncover, prioritize, and validate vulnerability rectifications. These efforts are greatly enhanced by Bugcrowd's established adversarial testing, performed by a global network of highly skilled hackers.

With this integration, Bugcrowd sets a precedent by delivering continuous security coverage from inception to deployment in a singular platform. By harnessing Mayhem's AI and Bugcrowd's crowdsourced insights, enterprises can continually mitigate attack risks, remove hazardous code dependencies, and align with modern cyber threats.

The visionaries behind Mayhem Security, Dr. David Brumley and Dr. Thanassis Avgerinos, are celebrated cybersecurity scholars with substantial credentials from Carnegie Mellon University. Their platform has historically merged academic depth with practical application, exemplified by their 2016 DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge victory.

Today, Mayhem's AI platform delivers perpetual security evaluations across APIs, code, and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), besides providing environments for Reinforcement Learning - vital for training emergent LLM models. Specifically, Mayhem offers:

  • API Security: Fully automating penetration tests to accurately root out and fix API vulnerabilities.
  • Code Security: Accelerates secure code deployment faster than conventional methods.
  • Dynamic SBOM: Enhances compliance by identifying and rectifying third-party liabilities.
  • Reinforcement Learning: Empowers agents to run, identify, and resolve software vulnerabilities autonomously.

Industry leaders emphasize that this acquisition strategically positions Bugcrowd to lead the cybersecurity landscape as development timelines shorten and threat horizons expand. It capitalizes on an integrated approach that accentuates anticipatory and adaptable threat management over reactionary strategies.

This groundbreaking coalition of AI and human-fueled resources holds promise in restructuring the threat landscape, poised to offer robust, proactive solutions. Bugcrowd and Mayhem Security together embody the future of cybersecurity, mastering the synergy of human intuition and machine intelligence.