Synack + Tenable: AI-Powered Partnership Translates Vulnerability Insights into Action

The combined Synack/Tenable solution reduces alert noise for overloaded security teams, isolating the most exploitable threats so they can proactively close security gaps faster.

Vulnerability Assessment 🤝 Penetration Testing

Vulnerability assessment, including automated scanning, is a great first step in identifying potential security risks. However, massive amounts of data can make it tricky for security teams to prioritize the exposures that real-world attackers are most likely to exploit.

Penetration testing complements vulnerability assessment by confirming exploitability while providing detailed analysis, paths to remediation and patch verification, so teams can proactively close security gaps before bad actors can exploit them. But penetration testing and vulnerability management have traditionally been siloed.

The solution: Synack, the leader in human-led and AI-powered Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), has partnered with Tenable to offer the best of both worlds. Customers can get vital insights from Tenable Vulnerability Management integrated with Synack’s AI-assisted vulnerability triage and penetration testing. This all-in-one security partnership leverages the extensive vulnerability intelligence provided by Tenable Research and is backed up by the power of the Synack Red Team, a vetted group of 1,500 ethical hackers who ensure vulnerability results are actionable — and that your fixes actually work.

3 key takeaways: Solving cybersecurity challenges

Here’s a look at three real-world challenges facing security teams, how they benefit attackers and how the Synack + Tenable partnership can help:

Challenge: Automated scanning inundates security teams with alerts.

• Risk: Overwhelmed teams can't focus on the flaws that matter most, potentially leaving opportunities for attackers to breach your systems.
• How Tenable and Synack can help: This offering allows you to leverage combined vulnerability assessment, AI-driven triage and human-led pentesting expertise to identify the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to your organization.

Challenge: There are too many potentially vulnerable assets for humans to pentest quickly.

• Risk: Manual pentests can help harden the most critical assets, but attackers look for the path of least resistance and may attack adjacent targets before pivoting to their ultimate goal.
• How Tenable and Synack can help: AI-assisted vulnerability prioritization by Tenable Vulnerability Management, combined with Synack Autonomous Red Agent (Sara) AI-enabled vulnerability triage, reins in exploitable vulnerabilities quickly and at scale. This machine-led approach reserves human testing expertise for the most critical assets and nuanced exploitability gaps.

Challenge: Vulnerabilities are identified, but security gaps aren’t being addressed. Companies take a median of 38 days to fully remediate flaws listed in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, according to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report. And nearly one in three companies studied by Verizon never fully mitigated critical vulnerabilities in edge devices that surfaced last year. 

• Risk: Attackers need not spend time researching novel exploit variants or devising zero-day attacks. They can simply re-use well known attack vectors. This lowers the bar in terms of required attacker skills and opens the door for rapidly deployable AI-generated attacks.
• How Tenable and Synack can help: Our joint solution leverages AI technologies to offer rapid machine-versus-machine defense against well-known vulnerabilities, combined with human-in-the-loop oversight to detect and remediate newer and more subtle security flaws.

The case for AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop security testing

The modern defender’s greatest challenge is attack velocity. Nearly half of organizations surveyed by the World Economic Forum early this year reported adversarial advances powered by AI as their greatest security concern, given the scale and speed of the threat. Adversaries are leveraging AI as an offensive force multiplier to automate, accelerate and scale their operations. With the help of AI, the time between when a vulnerability becomes known and when an attacker can weaponize and exploit it has shrunk from weeks to minutes. Furthermore, AI lowers barriers to entry for bad actors, increasing the scale and scope of attack vectors. Modern defenders must evolve their techniques and tools to identify, prioritize, triage and patch security gaps with equal velocity.

Visibility from traditional vulnerability scanning is a necessary defense, but results can be voluminous, making it difficult to quickly prioritize and remediate the most pressing security concerns. Not all exposures identified by vulnerability scans are necessarily exploitable in a particular environment — bad actors may be thwarted by firewalls and other security protection. Prolonged activity, such as advanced persistent threats, may be difficult to tease out from individual scan results.

AI-enabled attacks exacerbate the challenge. Due to limited resources, it can be difficult for IT and security teams to devote the necessary time and expertise to sift through noise, triage and remediate the most pressing and exploitable vulnerabilities in their environment.

The cybersecurity industry has, rightly, turned to AI to help customers manage this crisis. We see the industry launching impressive AI-powered capabilities: For example, Tenable’s enhanced AI-powered Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR), part of Tenable Vulnerability Management, leverages machine learning to bring much-needed intelligence and speed to vulnerability prioritization, highlighting important misconfigurations, outdated software and known vulnerability patterns with breathtaking efficiency.

Synack, meanwhile, has added AI-enabled testing capabilities to its PTaaS platform. Leveraging vulnerability data from integration with Tenable Vulnerability Management, Synack’s Sara agentic AI architecture can further triage and verify exploitability across an entire attack surface in minutes. Synack’s integration with Tenable provides an AI-enabled workflow for machine-scale analysis and defense, quickly completing tasks that could take humans months.

However, at Synack, we believe AI is only half the equation. There is still a huge gap between what even the most advanced AI agent can find and what a creative, determined human attacker can uncover. So the Synack PTaaS platform continues to leverage the diverse skillsets of the global Synack Red Team of elite security researchers.

The Synack PTaaS platform, integrated with Tenable Vulnerability Management, blends the velocity and breadth of AI triage with targeted human-in-the-loop oversight and testing. Tenable vulnerability assessment findings are ingested into the Synack PTaaS platform, where they are triaged and verified by AI or passed to in-depth, human-led security testing by the Synack Red Team when needed. These ethical hackers act as an extension to customer IT and security teams, assisting in triage, isolation and remediation of the most challenging security gaps.

Conclusion

The Synack PTaaS platform leverages context from Tenable Vulnerability Management, combining it with AI triage plus human testing techniques to confirm vulnerabilities that are actually exploitable in the customer’s environment. This hybrid human-and-AI approach provides detailed exploit analysis, makes recommendations for remediation and verifies successful patching. The combined Synack/Tenable solution relieves burden from overloaded security teams by reducing noise, isolating the most exploitable threats and helping to proactively close security gaps faster. Our integrated AI-powered partnership translates vulnerability insights into action.

About Synack

Synack is the leader in human-led and AI-powered Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS), transforming offensive security to help organizations proactively reduce risk, stay compliant and defend against evolving cyber threats. We are committed to making the world more secure by harnessing agentic AI innovations and a talented, vetted community of security researchers to deliver continuous penetration testing and autonomous vulnerability management. Founded by former NSA operatives, Synack has enabled nearly 10 million hours of expert testing to protect critical assets, from global financial systems to U.S. Defense Department networks. Learn more at www.synack.com

Related resources

• Synack-Tenable partnership page
• Tenable Integration Datasheet
• Sara Triage Datasheet
• Cut to the Chase Guided Tour

Learn more

• Synack PTaaS: Get demos
• Tenable Vulnerability Management: Request a free trial