Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

With so many AI tools out there, it’s getting harder to find the ones actually worth your time. A lot of projects look alike and the differences between them can come down to minor UI tweaks. But it’s still worth digging, because every now and then you find something good.

One of the interesting projects we came across recently is Cybermes. It’s an offensive security assistant and automation framework built for bug bounty hunting, recon and reporting. It has more than 200 security playbooks and full Model Context Protocol (MCP) support. The most notable thing here is the reporting structure. The framework handles reporting really well, it has a scope.yaml file you can modify and the TUI interface looks clean.

We’ll show what the assistant can do and how well it handles the tasks.

Setting Up

Unlike PentestCode, there’s some work to do before you can start using the tool.

First, make sure you have Go installed on your Kali. The framework needs to compile tools and without Go your installation will be incomplete.

kali > sudo apt update 
kali > sudo apt install go-lang

Then download the repository and run the setup script.

kali > git clone https://github.com/Zyrexnn/Cybermes.git
kali > cd Cybermes
kali > python3 -m venv venv; source venv/bin/activate
kali > chmod 777 setup.sh
kali > ./setup.sh

It’ll take a few minutes. When it’s done, run the doctor script to make sure everything is in order.

kali > python3 tools/doctor.py

After that, add your OpenRouter API key to two env files before you can start working with the tool.

kali > vim .env
kali > vim hermes/.env

Make sure you add the API key to both files, otherwise it won’t work.

kali > ./cybermes model

Finally, specify the scope in scope.yaml. We’ve got OWASP Juice Shop for the test, listening on port 3000.

Now we’re all set.

IDOR/BOLA – Terminal User Interface 

The Terminal User Interface is clean and easy to work with, so we’ll start there. You might end up preferring it over the CLI version.

kali > TARGET=127_0_0_1_3000
kali > ./cybermes –tui

Our first prompt in TUI is hunting for IDOR using Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. As the model tests the target, you’ll see entries populating the screen with the commands the tool runs.

Fifteen minutes later we got our results and BOLA was confirmed.

Reporting is really the strongest side of this framework. It created a couple of files with reports and sorted them properly. As you keep hunting for bugs on the same target, all your findings get brought together in one file.

Findings are always stored in Markdown format and keep almost the same structure every time, which makes them look professional.

JWT & SQLi – Command-line Interface 

Now let’s look at the CLI version and try to find more bugs.

kali > ./cybermes --cli

Our first prompt will be testing JWT:

Authorized lab only. Target http://127.0.0.1:3000/rest/user/login.
Audit authentication and JWT handling with non-destructive requests. Try the publicly documented Juice Shop demo accounts if needed (admin@juice-sh.op / admin123 and a normal user you register).

Check token claims, privilege flags, and whether a standard user can hit admin-ish REST routes.
Record only confirmed issues under reports/127_0_0_1_3000/findings/.

It took some time to reason through and test the app, then gave the results.

The same files were produced again, with PoCs and an explanation of each bug and the risks tied to it.

We also tested SQLi on search:

Authorized lab only. Audit http://127.0.0.1:3000/rest/products/search?q= for SQL injection using safe syntax and error/timing evidence. Do not dump the full database into the terminal. If confirmed, write reports/127_0_0_1_3000/findings/high_sqli_product_search.md and a minimal PoC in pocs/.

Here’s the report on our SQLi finding, looking just as good as the previous ones.

The tool passed all our tests against the Juice Shop and brought the findings together in the final report. The skills it ships with work well. You might want to go through them and add some of the ones we covered recently. We covered a repository with 83 skills and almost half of those were built by studying 681 real bug reports that people actually got paid for on HackerOne.

Summary

Cybermes has clear strengths. It’s good at reporting, it has a clean TUI and a big library of built in skills. The framework sets up quickly if you have Go installed on your Kali and it already knows which tools to work with based on those skills. That’s handy. We used OpenRouter for this test, but you can also point it at your local Ollama models. For that you’ll need a tool calling model (qwen2.5:14b). Chat only 3B models won’t cut it here.

We also invite you to join our AI for Cybersecurity training. During the training, we’ll show you different ways of using AI in cybersecurity, set up local models and solve labs. The field is evolving rapidly and the sooner you learn things, the greater the advantage you’ll have.

The post Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cybersecurity, Part 27: Web App Hacking with Cybermes first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

Sometimes you might run the same model twice and get different results. That often happens when you’ve upgraded it with skills. Skills are detailed text documents that lay out the tools the model should use, the approach it should take and how it should analyze the results. Good skills are practical, pulled from actual reports on HackerOne and other bug bounty platforms. A model can still lean on its own knowledge, but that’s just less efficient.

There are plenty of skills out there you might come across, but not everything can be trusted. Some skills can simply be dangerous and infect your system. To make sure they are safe, you can check them with SkillSpector by NVIDIA, so you don’t end up with anything malicious on your system.

Bug Bounty Skills

Both of these repositories do bug bounty hunting end to end, but they go about it in almost opposite ways.

The first is called Bountyforge. It’s actually just one single skill file, but it’s smart enough to split itself into eight different mini agents that all work at the same time. One looks at websites and apps, another at crypto and blockchain, others go after different angles hackers can exploit. It also checks each finding with four different tests to make sure it’s not a false alarm. Then you get a report in whatever format the bug bounty program wants.

You don’t even need Claude Code or any other coding tool for this, you can just run it right inside the regular Claude website in your browser.

The second bug bounty repository is Claude-BugHunter. It takes the opposite approach. The repo has 83 skills and almost half of those were built by studying 681 real bug reports that people actually got paid for on HackerOne. These skills aren’t locked to Claude Code either, you can use OpenCode, Codex or Hermes Agents with them.

Here are a few examples of the results we got with these skills.

API endpoints are often vulnerable and this is worth trying your luck on to see how it goes.

Another approach can be APK reverse engineering. Here we found a hardcoded RSA-2048 signing private key baked into the published APK. With that key, hackers can push a new app to the app store and infect every employee phone, getting access not just to the WiFi network at the workplace but to their personal life too. Quite dangerous.

We found an API endpoint vulnerable to an SQL injection and managed to pull the entire database.

Having skills built on real attacks keeps the model from wandering off into its own weird approaches and missing a lot of good findings. 

Active Directory Skills

Claude-AD was made by ADScanPro for testing a company’s internal network. It gives your model a playbook with skills and agents built for an Active Directory assessment. The developers are upfront that it’s not an auto pwn tool. It’s meant to guide you through the assessment. Every finding can get mapped to a compliance control (DORA, NIS2 and ENS).

Claude-AD is very careful about getting caught too. It explains what a security team would actually see on their end if that technique got used. And any time it’s about to do something that would actually change things on the company’s network, it stops and asks for confirmation first.

General Cybersecurity Skills

Antropic-Cybersecurity-Skills is basically a giant reference book. It has 817 skills covering 29 areas of security work, cloud security, malware analysis, all the way down to hardware and firmware. Each skill is its own small file, so your agent will quickly pull out the two or three it actually needs for its task.

Every skill ties back to real security frameworks that companies and auditors already use (NIST CSF, MITRE ATT&CK and so on). So if your model finds a problem using one of these skills, it can also tell you exactly which official standard it violates. You can use it to justify findings to a compliance team.

SCADA Skills

On an industrial network, a clumsy scan can shut down a production line or damage physical equipment, since a lot of this gear is old and wasn’t built to handle unexpected traffic. That’s why the ICS skill by Masriyan is built to never actively touch a live industrial network. Instead, it works off network captures someone already took. It reads the file, recognizes industrial protocols by the ports they normally run on (Modbus, DNP3, Siemens S7, EtherNet/IP, OPC-UA, and more) and counts which devices are talking to each other. It then shows you write commands, these are the ones that change a value on an industrial device. That’s the traffic you want to see first.

The second mode skips network captures and instead searches for exposed industrial equipment using Shodan and Censys. The skill can also help your model reason about how an industrial network is laid out and check findings against MITRE’s ICS specific attack framework and the IEC 62443 security standard.

Science Skills

Although science isn’t really what we want to focus on here, in one of our SCADA articles we mentioned that to carry out a successful attack requires hackers to understand the technical process of the plant. That means understanding how the chemicals are produced and which units are used along the way. We also showed how vinyl acetate is produced and talked about paracetamol production.

1 kg of paracetamol at 100% purity was reported to cost €8,205, while 1 kg at 99% purity cost just €5. So even a single day of sabotage could cause serious financial damage to an enterprise.

Finding a scientist among hackers is quite a challenge, which is why Stuxnet needed a group of people from different backgrounds working toward one objective. But now hackers can just import different skills to make their attacks more devastating. K-Dense published 140 skills with access to different scientific databases and Python tools.

The real concern here isn’t ICS exploits inside the repository, there aren’t any. It’s the access to sensitive scientific data paired with an AI agent that can actually understand that data and change it.

Summary

AI skills can be a gamechanger, especially when they’re based on actual reports hackers got paid for. These skills show your model how to approach things and what tools to use during the test, so it doesn’t wander off hallucinating and inventing its own ways of testing things. That can wreck your bug bounty flow, since you’ll end up overlooking plenty of potential targets.

Simply relying on the AI to find things isn’t enough, hunters that do it keep getting a lot of dupes. You need to test things manually too. For this reason we created our Bug Bounty training to show you how to find bugs and work with the AI more efficiently.

The post Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cybersecurity, Part 25: Upgrading Your Model with Specific Skillset first appeared on Hackers Arise.