As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to accelerate the scale and sophistication of cyberattacks worldwide, Nigeria’s leading cybersecurity professional services firm, Digital Encode, has launched DEPAS AI, a fully autonomous enterprise penetration testing platform designed to help organisations identify and address vulnerabilities continuously.
The launch comes against the backdrop of growing AI-driven cyber threats.
According to IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report, AI-enabled breaches now account for 25 per cent of all malicious incidents, representing a 56 per cent year-on-year increase.
The report also puts the average cost of an AI-enabled breach at US$6.04 million, significantly above the global average of US$4.99 million.
North America recorded the highest share of attack activity at 29 per cent, followed by Asia-Pacific with 27 per cent, Europe at 25 per cent, the Middle East and Africa at 10 per cent, and Latin America at nine per cent, highlighting the increasingly borderless nature of AI-powered cyber threats.
DEPAS AI: Deep, Precise and Autonomous
Digital Encode said DEPAS AI — Digital Encode Penetration Autonomous System — was developed to move organisations beyond periodic and largely manual security assessments towards continuous, autonomous cyber resilience.
The platform deploys a team of specialised AI security agents that operate concurrently across an organisation’s attack surface. An agentic coordinator orchestrates the testing process, maintains context of the system under test, analyses results in real time and deploys follow-up agents where necessary to achieve deeper coverage.
To improve the reliability of its findings, DEPAS AI independently reproduces each identified vulnerability through a verification agent, helping to minimise false positives. Its proprietary chain-builder further maps individual vulnerabilities into high-impact attack chains, showing how seemingly separate weaknesses could potentially be combined by attackers to compromise an organisation.
According to Digital Encode, DEPAS AI can autonomously test enterprise-specific 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 Prof. Adewale Obadare, Chief Visionary Officer at Digital Encode.
“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.”
Built for Continuous Cyber Resilience
Digital Encode said DEPAS AI offers 24/7 autonomous testing across applications, cloud and network assets, enabling organisations to continuously monitor their attack surface rather than relying solely on scheduled penetration tests.
The platform also provides independent validation of vulnerabilities, attack-chain mapping that connects disparate security flaws into realistic exploitation paths, and actionable outputs, including executive-ready reports, remediation guidance and compliance mapping.
With the launch, Digital Encode aims to provide enterprises in Nigeria and other markets with the capability to detect, prioritise and remediate cybersecurity risks before they can be exploited by malicious actors.
The company said the platform represents a shift in enterprise penetration testing from periodic assessments to a more continuous, intelligent and autonomous approach to cyber defence.