In this episode of "Full Tech Ahead," host Amanda Razani reports live from Qualys’s annual risk operations conference in Austin, interviewing Kunal Modasiya, Senior VP of Product Management, GTM and Growth at Qualys. The core message of the 2026 conference is clear: organizations must use AI to fight AI.
Modasiya explains that cyber adversaries are leveraging frontier AI models to automate exploit chaining at machine speed, drastically compressing the window between vulnerability disclosure and active weaponization. Meanwhile, security teams face unprecedented disclosure volumes—such as Microsoft releasing 972 patches in a single Patch Tuesday, a 10X year-over-year increase.
To close the remediation gap and shorten turnaround times from 60–90 days to under 48 hours, Qualys unveiled TruRisk Eliminate 2.0 and its new Autonomous RemOps framework. Central to this launch are the "Three Musketeer Agents" (Agent Insta for instant detection, Agent Val for exploit validation, and Agent Sara for zero-day remediation planning) alongside the True Confidence orchestration engine, which ensures patches and mitigations do not disrupt critical business uptime.
Key Quotes
- "Our message is that use AI to fight with AI. That's the only way to do this. There is no other way. Human cannot outpace the machine speed."
- "With frontier AI models, what attackers are able to do is to build the exploit chaining at the machine speed... That's what the AI is giving them an unfair advantage."
- "The automation to automate and fix those vulnerabilities was never the blocker. The real blocker was the confidence... What if after the patch is deployed, it brings down my banking application?"
- "There is never, ever going to be zero risk... If the benefit outweighs the risk, take the risk and go for it. We firmly believe the next decade will be dominated by agents with the human in the loop."
Takeaways
- Focus on the Funnel's Bottom, Not Top: Vulnerability disclosures (the top of the funnel) have increased tenfold, but not all disclosures present actual operational danger. Security operations must stop panicking over raw theoretical volumes and instead focus strictly on validated, exploitable exposures (the bottom of the funnel) actively weaponized by adversaries.
- Overcome the Remediation Confidence Barrier: Automated patching has long been technically possible, yet enterprise SLAs linger at 60 to 90 days because leaders fear updates will cause downtime in mission-critical applications. Engines like True Confidence mitigate this by benchmarking business resilience and compensatory controls before, during, and after deployment, offering automated rollback options.
- Adopt the "Three Musketeers" Agent Framework: Modern defense requires autonomous cooperation: Agent Insta detects incoming vulnerabilities instantly, Agent Val safely attempts exploitation in the local environment to filter theoretical risks from real threats, and Agent Sara orchestrates zero-day remediation planning and compensatory workarounds.
- Transition to Autonomous RemOps: The role of the CISO has shifted from logging tickets to executing remediation within 48 hours. Organizations should establish an Autonomous Remediation Operations (RemOps) strategy that factors in existing compensatory controls (like CrowdStrike or Zscaler), choosing patchless mitigations when traditional patching poses downtime risks.
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