Exploited in Minutes: MOAK, Mythos, and the Industrialization of Exploitation
The window from vulnerability discovery to working exploit used to be measured in years. MOAK closed it to 21 minutes.
In this episode I sit down with Niv Hoffman and Yair Saban, co-founders of a stealth-mode, Sequoia-backed cybersecurity company and the creators of MOAK (Mother of All KEVs), the first agentic AI workflow to autonomously exploit hundreds of known exploited vulnerabilities with nothing more than a CVE number as input.
They built MOAK in the same week Anthropic dropped Mythos Preview, but the idea had been brewing for far longer. Their thesis was simple and devastating: if a model is good at engineering with a feedback loop, it’s going to be good at exploitation. Practitioners didn’t believe them, until MOAK exploited a React-to-shell vulnerability in 21 minutes, fully autonomously, with no human in the loop.
We cover the architecture, the implications, and what it actually means for enterprises navigating this new threat environment.
8 Key Takeaways
Exploitation is engineering with a feedback loop. Niv and Yair’s core insight was that if frontier models are great at engineering, they’re inevitably great at exploitation — a claim practitioners resisted until MOAK proved it in 21 minutes with no human guidance.
The KEV catalog is the right threat model. MOAK specifically targets CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities — the small fraction of CVEs that have actually been used to breach organizations — not the entire CVE universe. The input is a CVE number. The output is a validated working exploit.
The five-agent architecture mirrors real offensive operations. Collector, Researcher, Builder, Exploiter, and Judge — each with a discrete role, no POCs downloaded from the internet, no shortcuts. The researcher builds a mind map of exploit primitives and chains them together. The exploiter tests against a live environment with a hidden flag to confirm success.
Mythos confirmed the thesis, but Glasswing is where it gets interesting. Niv and Yair are watching Glasswing closely — Anthropic partnering directly with Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, and major OS maintainers represents the most “shift left” security posture imaginable. Their prediction: a two-year meteor shower of newly discovered CVEs as every Glasswing partner surfaces decades of buried vulnerabilities.
The AI-generated code problem compounds the attack surface exponentially. GitHub hit 1 billion commits in 2025 and is on pace for 14 billion in 2026. AI is simultaneously automating exploitation and generating the code being exploited. Niv put it plainly: “The problem AI amplifies is squared.”
Enterprises are largely on their own right now. Glasswing helps major foundations and big tech. It doesn’t have a clear answer for the average enterprise. Niv’s prescription isn’t a new tool — it’s team play between the CISO and CTO, with security and engineering finally aligned on remediation as a shared priority.
MOAK hasn’t released the code or any exploits — but the models to replicate it are already public. Yair was direct: attackers can leverage public models to build this workflow themselves. The gap isn’t the model. It’s knowing how to construct the right agentic system around it.
Multiple CISOs reached out after MOAK launched to say it gave them a smoking gun. The most unexpected outcome: security leaders using MOAK as internal proof to finally get CTO buy-in that autonomous exploitation is a top priority for 2026. Sometimes the best awareness tool is a live dashboard showing your vulnerabilities being exploited in real time.
Niv and Yair’s company is currently in stealth. Watch this space!
