As artificial intelligence reshapes the global cybersecurity landscape, Nigerian cybersecurity professional services firm Digital Encode Limited has launched DEPAS AI, an autonomous enterprise penetration testing platform designed to help organizations identify and respond to cyber vulnerabilities at greater speed and scale.
The launch comes amid growing evidence that cybercriminals are increasingly using artificial intelligence to automate attacks, identify weaknesses and operate more efficiently. According to IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report, AI-enabled breaches now account for 25% of all malicious incidents, representing a 56% year over year increase. The average cost of these breaches has risen to US$6.04 million, significantly above the global average of US$4.99 million.
The threat is global. North America records the highest share of attack activity at 29%, followed by Asia Pacific at 27%, Europe at 25%, the Middle East and Africa at 10%, and Latin America at 9%.
Against this backdrop, Digital Encode says DEPAS AI is designed to move organizations beyond periodic and largely manual penetration testing toward continuous, autonomous cyber resilience.
DEPAS AI, short for Digital Encode Penetration Autonomous System, uses multiple specialized AI security agents that can operate simultaneously across an organization’s attack surface. An agentic coordinator oversees the testing process, maintains context of the environment being assessed, analyzes results in real time and deploys additional agents where deeper investigation is required.
The platform also includes an independent verification process. Findings are reproduced by a verification agent to help reduce false positives, while a proprietary chain-builder connects individual vulnerabilities into potential attack chains. This allows organizations to understand not only where a weakness exists, but also how multiple weaknesses could potentially be combined by an attacker to cause greater damage.
DEPAS AI is designed to assess a broad range of enterprise environments, including bespoke applications, web applications, APIs, mobile applications, backend systems, cloud environments and network/IP infrastructure.
“AI is now being weaponized by attackers to move faster than human teams can respond,” said Obadare Adewale, Chief Visionary Officer at Digital Encode Limited. “DEPAS AI combines Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence to give organizations the same speed and scale in defense. We are reimagining penetration testing for the AI era.”
The launch reflects a wider shift in cybersecurity from traditional, scheduled security assessments toward systems capable of continuously identifying, validating and prioritizing emerging vulnerabilities.
For organizations facing increasingly automated cyber threats, Digital Encode believes the ability to test security environments continuously and understand how individual weaknesses can become coordinated attack paths will be critical to building stronger cyber resilience in the AI era.
