Wartime Footing, Horizon3 Lifts Dawn On NodeZero Kubernetes Pentesting

Horizon3 has announced the release of its NodeZero Kubernetes Pentesting product. Known for its approach to autonomous continuous penetration testing at the SaaS level, Horizon3 is making the new service available to all users of its NodeZero platform, an orchestrated pentest service designed to allow software teams to prioritize and fix weaknesses in a given network topography, with an offensive approach that the company likens to a wartime stance.

Specifically engineered to be deployed directly within a Kubernetes cluster, this is said to be penetration testing engineered to identify and exploit vulnerabilities from an attacker’s perspective. This negative-positive stance (the company calls it an “offensive approach”) is hoped to help uncover weaknesses that could jeopardize systems at the infrastructure, application or service level.

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We know that Kubernetes has become foundational, widely popularized, and (in many development shops) practically standardized as a de facto deployment facet in modern cloud-native environments, but why has the company chosen to focus its penetration testing prowess on this area now? The company says that NodeZero Insights addresses a critical gap for business leaders, which in practical terms means the absence of continuous, reliable security metrics.

Distribution-Specific Weaknesses 

NodeZero’s approach prioritizes real-time security testing at the runtime level. This methodology is designed to reveal the blast radius that attackers might be able to achieve by chaining Kubernetes-specific vulnerabilities with cloud and on-premises infrastructure weaknesses. 

According to Snehal Antani, CEO and co-founder of Horizon3, traditional pentests (often conducted only a few times a year) fail to provide an ongoing, accurate picture of security readiness. NodeZero Insights provides IT teams with data that integrates into monthly or quarterly board updates to meet the executive demand for consistent security metrics.

“With Kubernetes operating as essential infrastructure, security teams must defend it as rigorously as any core system,” said Antani. “NodeZero Kubernetes Pentesting goes beyond surface checks, i.e., showing exactly how attackers can exploit weaknesses in real-time. This is about putting organizations in a ‘wartime’ stance, enabling them to see the true paths of attack and proactively harden their defenses against evolving threats.”

Lateral Movers’ Manoeuvers

With what we might class as “traditional” security tools focused on compliance or control plane analysis, NodeZero’s real-time tests are designed to pinpoint vulnerabilities such as container escapes and role-based access control (RBAC) misconfigurations. These are the types of loopholes that malicious attackers and bad actors will typically exploit to “move laterally” throughout network layers and therefore escalate their own privileges once inside a system, thereby aiding their ability to compromise underlying infrastructures.

 “A single pentest is merely a snapshot in time – quickly outdated as environments change. That’s why 82% of Horizon3 customers have shifted from annual to monthly pentesting, and 40% conduct at least weekly pentests,” said Stephen Gates, principal security subject matter expert at Horizon3. “NodeZero Insights enables these customers to visualize changes in their security posture from pentest to pentest and provides much-needed intelligence to accelerate improvements.”

Offensive-Based Assessments 

The move towards this kind of wartime offensive stance on penetration testing is part of what may be a wider shift towards offensive-based assessments that make use of directly adversarial techniques designed to deliver network protection and strength.

The team at Horizon3 says that as the adoption of managed Kubernetes distributions like AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) grows, the risks from complex and distribution-specific weaknesses increase as well. All of this helps to justify the need to adopt an offensive stance at this level with what Horizon3 details as its tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) that mimic typical real-world attacker behavior inside Kubernetes environments.