Team Research blog
The IncludeSec team explores the practical considerations of AI-assisted source code analysis. Observing results produced with frontier vs locally-hosted models, various harness orchestration designs, and a list of different language frameworks provided us with meaningful insights into how the modern pentester should be using AI to produce higher quality results (but not necessarily in less time!)
In this post we look under the hood of BrightData’s SDK and how it turns ordinary consumer TVs into exit nodes of an enormous commercial, residential proxy network leveraged by the AI industry to scrape web data and train language learning models.
The Include Security team attended the BSides 2026 CTF competition and observed how effective frontier models have become at solving a variety of CTF challenges. Our team gives a first-hand account of how the winning strategy has recently shifted to prioritizing efficient solve times and orchestration pipelines that can combine the speed of lighter-weight models on easier challenges with a heavy-hitting model’s reasoning capabilities. We also highlight why the success of LLMs in CTFs does not translate as effectively in the arena of professional security assessments.
Are you using Terraform to build or configure your AWS environment? You might be surprised by configuration settings that introduce vulnerabilities by default, particularly if you’re already familiar with using the AWS or other cloud provider interfaces for asset creation. This post focuses on the slowly growing security divide of AWS asset security settings when created by the Terraform provider vs the AWS UI.
Java programmers might not be aware their secrets could be floating around in system memory long after it’s assumed those secrets have been removed. The problem is a combination of immutability and garbage collection in Java. Our most recent post explores the unpredictability of Java garbage collection and the implications that has for secrets in code. We developed a simple proof of concept designed to measured these “secret ghosts” and demonstrate how to avoid them.