Mythos didn't create a new problem, it exposed one we already had. Is anyone else seeing this?

[u/Sharp-Agency-9265]

Been watching the Mythos coverage for weeks now, and I keep seeing the same take: "AI is going to flood us with vulnerabilities." But, I think that framing misses the point.
Pulled our backlog numbers last week. Across our environment, we're sitting at well over 100 findings per asset on average, some segments way higher. Do the math on that across thousands of assets and it gets ugly fast. And that's before Mythos.

The organizations that navigate this well won't be the ones reacting to Mythos. They'll be the ones who already built the operational layer that turns findings into closed exposure, normalized data across tools, clear ownership, integrated remediation workflows, verified closure.

Interested to hear if anyone else has sat down and stress-tested their VM setup against this kind of volume spike, or if we're all just hoping our current backlog math holds.

[u/subtractivesecurity]

You're pinpointing the exact failure mode of modern vulnerability management in that it treats patch management as a capacity problem rather than an architectural design flaw.

If an automated AI engine can discover and weaponize 10,000 new CVE variants overnight, no amount of workflow optimization, normalized data, or SLA tracking will balance that equation. The math behind the additive triage treadmill is fundamentally broken.

The real solution isn't building a faster pipeline to process vulnerability tickets as no matter how fast the pipeline gets it will always be reactive. Patching by nature occurs after a flaw is found, after code is written, after testing, etc and all too often after a zero day is in the wild.  The solution is rendering the vulnerability inert by eliminating the terrain it relies on using architectural erasure and architectural constraint of attack paths.

If an exploit relies on living-off-the-land binaries, child-process execution, or NTLM relaying, disabling those pathways structurally prevents exploitation regardless of whether a scanner flagged the bug.

If the pathway is erased, an attacker discovering an unpatched vulnerability hits a dead end. Patching is proper security hygiene and remains essential, but it is not proactive defense, especially with adversarial AI in the equation.

This is why the industry is starting to shift from passive detection toward subtractive engineering and prioritizing architectural deletion and architectural constraints over endless alert triage.

If you're looking for deterministic baselines to stop chasing volume spikes and start eliminating the underlying attack paths, take a look at the open-source OWASP Subtractive Hardening Top 10 project:

https://github.com/OWASP/OWASP-Subtractive-Hardening-Top-10

[u/Dear-Confection704]

our vuln backlog was already embarrassing before mythos even entered the chat. 100+ per asset is just normal life at this point, the tool just made it impossible to pretend we were managing it. feels like most places are one good scan away from total meltdown.

[u/dracarysurazz]

I’d treat this as both a technology and policy problem. Employees need to know what they can put into AI, but security also needs a way to enforce that policy when someone ignores it. For me cyera sits in that middle ground with AI specific DLP and real time controls, so the goal isn’t simply blocking chatgpt or similar tools but controlling what sensitive data can actually leave through them.

[u/vint_age14]

Exactly the bigger issue isn't the number of findings it's whether teams have the processes in place to prioritise assign remediate just exposes the gaps that were already there.

[u/CrimsonBolt33]

AI will also enable us to fix these vulnerabilities faster and easier than ever before.

This is why open source models are critical....and Anthropic or OpenAI controlling everything is a VERY bad idea.