Infosec professionals sour on automated pentesting tools

Perhaps bots aren't the answer to everything when it comes to finding flaws. Fully automated pentesting has been a letdown for many security teams, according to offensive security firm Cobalt, as support for the approach has fallen sharply over the past year. Cobalt’s recent 2026 State of Pentesting report found, among other things, that security practitioners are rapidly ditching autonomous pentesting tools, in large part because they’re simply failing to detect critical vulnerabili