Exciting news for AI governance! Rapid7 has achieved ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification for our Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS). The certificate was issued by Schellman Compliance, LLC, an ANAB accredited certification body, following an independent audit of how we govern the AI systems we develop in our role as an AI provider.
What is ISO/IEC 42001?
ISO/IEC 42001 is the first international management system standard for artificial intelligence. Where ISO/IEC 27001 focuses on information security, ISO/IEC 42001 focuses on how an organization governs AI. What exactly does “governing AI” mean? Essentially, it means how AI risks and impacts are assessed, how data is managed, how systems are monitored once they’re in production, and how humans stay in the loop across the AI lifecycle.
This certification means an accredited third party has audited our AIMS and confirmed that it aligns to the standard. To note, this isn’t a one-time exercise, as the certification is maintained through annual surveillance audits. This means our AI governance program is held to the standard for as long as the certificate is active.
Why is ISO/IEC 42001 certification important?
AI is continually evolving how security teams work, and it’s also causing teams to reconsider the questions they ask their vendors. Where does the model come from? What data does it use? Who reviews its outputs? How do we maintain the integrity and quality of our AI products?
ISO/IEC 42001 certification gives customers independent evidence that Rapid7 has a management system in place to address those questions. It demonstrates that the in-scope AI systems are developed and operated under a structured program covering risk assessment, transparency, human oversight, and accountability.
It also supports customers in their own governance work. Many organizations are building AI risk into their third party risk programs and preparing for frameworks and regulations such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the EU AI Act. A vendor's certified AIMS doesn't replace a customer's own due diligence, but it provides a credible, audited starting point.
As with cloud security, AI follows a shared responsibility model. Rapid7 is certified in the role of an AI provider, meaning we’re accountable for how we design, build, and operate these AI systems. Customers remain in control of how they use AI outputs within their own security operations.
Which AI systems are in scope?
The certification covers the AIMS supporting the following AI systems developed within Rapid7 products:
Agentic AI Workflow for MDR (Managed Detection and Response)
AI Dashboard Summary Card (Managed Detection and Response)
AI-Generated Risk Summaries (Exposure Command and Surface Command)
ICS Runtime Event Story (InsightCloudSec / Cloud Runtime)
Most of these are capabilities customers use directly within the product. Agentic AI Workflow for MDR supports Rapid7's own SOC analysts as they investigate and respond on behalf of MDR customers.
What's next?
ISO/IEC 42001 certification joins Rapid7's existing security and compliance program, which includes ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, IRAP, ENS, BSI C5, as well as U.S. and international cybersecurity regulations. Each is independently assessed against its own defined scope, with details available in the Rapid7 Trust Center (reach out to your Account Executive for access).
As our AI capabilities grow, our AI governance program will grow with them. As such, we'll update this post if the scope of certification changes.
Customers can request a copy of the certificate through their Account Executive or Rapid7 representative. The certificate can also be independently verified in Schellman's public certificate directory.
Cássio De Alcântara is Director, LATAM Sales at Rapid7.
Across Latin America, organizations are embracing cloud, AI, and digital transformation to drive innovation and business growth. These technologies create new opportunities, but also introduce greater complexity and expanding attack surfaces.
In this environment, security leaders are being asked to understand where risk exists across increasingly distributed environments and quickly eliminate blind spots like Shadow IT and Shadow AI – all without adding operational complexity.
To help security leaders and practitioners address this complexity, Rapid7 is excited to announce a new strategic distribution partnership with Licencias OnLine (LOL) across Latin America.
Helping organizations stay ahead of evolving threats
In order to keep day-to-day business operations moving, organizations need security solutions that not only protect critical assets but also support innovation, regulatory compliance, and long-term digital transformation.
Rapid7's AI-powered cybersecurity operations platform helps organizations strengthen cyber resilience by unifying continuous exposure management, AI-driven threat detection and response, and security automation. By connecting security data across endpoint, cloud, identity, and infrastructure environments, organizations leverage one platform to gain the visibility to reduce risk and act with confidence.
A shared commitment to partner success
Success in today’s fragmented cybersecurity environments depends on a strong ecosystem of partners who can help organizations implement, optimize, and maximize the value of unified security operations.
This is where Licencias OnLine comes in. With a strong, well-established presence across Latin America, deep cybersecurity expertise, and a highly specialized channel ecosystem, Licencias OnLine brings the local knowledge, technical enablement, and operational agility needed to help partners grow their cybersecurity practices and deliver greater value to customers.
Together, Rapid7 and Licencias OnLine will invest in technical training, partner enablement, joint marketing initiatives, and go-to-market programs that help partners expand managed security services, strengthen customer relationships, and accelerate business growth across the region.
Building cyber resilience together
As organizations across Latin America continue to modernize their IT environments, they should have access to security operations that are integrated, intelligent, and designed for today's AI-powered threat landscape.
Rapid7's open platform supports this approach through hundreds of technology integrations that help organizations eliminate security silos, improve visibility across their attack surfaces, and automate response workflows. This enables security teams to reduce operational complexity while improving cybersecurity program maturity.
By combining Rapid7's global cybersecurity innovation with Licencias OnLine's regional expertise and trusted partner network, this new alliance will make it easier for organizations across Latin America to strengthen cyber resilience while enabling partners to see greater success through measurable business outcomes.
We're excited to begin this next chapter together and look forward to supporting our partners as they help customers build stronger, more resilient security operations across the region.
Gopan Sivasankaran is Rapid7's Regional Director, Middle East & Africa.
Across Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, organizations are expanding their use of cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, digital services, and connected operations. But more technology does not automatically create stronger security operations; many security teams are not short on data, but rather on time, context, and specialist capacity.
As environments expand, the challenge is no longer finding another security product. It is turning existing technology and new investments into clearer risk decisions, faster investigations, and more consistent response, which requires more than software.
Rapid7 and StarLink: From access to operational capability
Africa has been an important region for Rapid7 for many years, and we’re proud of the role we’ve played in protecting organizations across the continent. We see significant opportunity ahead and remain committed to investing in our presence, partner ecosystem, and customer relationships across the region.
That continued investment is why Rapid7 is expanding its partnership with StarLink across Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya.
Security teams are often managing data across endpoints, cloud environments, identities, and third-party systems. Adding another disconnected tool can increase workload rather than reduce it. Modern security operations require a more connected approach. Exposure data should help teams understand where risk exists. Detection should identify active threats. Response and automation should help teams act before an issue becomes a larger business incident.
But even a well-designed platform needs skilled partners who can help customers deploy it, integrate it, and adapt it to local operational needs.
Why regional partner capability matters
Cybersecurity maturity varies by country, industry, and organization. A bank in Africa, a digital services provider in Kenya, a public-sector organization in Egypt, and an enterprise in Nigeria may share some security challenges, but they do not operate in identical environments. Partners provide the bridge between global technology and local customer reality.
Through this collaboration, Rapid7 and StarLink intend to give resellers, systems integrators, and managed security service providers access to technical enablement, solution expertise, and joint go-to-market support. The goal is to help partners build sustainable security practices, not simply complete individual product transactions.
Connecting exposure, detection, and response
Rapid7’s security operations approach brings exposure management, threat detection and response, managed services, and automation together. This can help teams connect two questions that are too often handled separately:
Where are we most exposed?
Where are attackers active now?
When partners can help customers answer both questions using shared security context, they can support more informed prioritization, faster investigation, and clearer remediation decisions.
Looking ahead
Africa’s digital growth will continue to create new security demands. Meeting them will require technology, but also skills, services, local understanding, and long-term collaboration. Rapid7 and StarLink are working together to help build that capability across the region.
Ready to build your security practice with Rapid7? Contact your Rapid7 or StarLink representative for upcoming training, technical enablement, and joint go-to-market opportunities, or explore the Rapid7 PACT Partner Program.
Ross Baker is Senior Director, Northern Europe at Rapid7.
As organizations across the United Kingdom and Ireland embrace AI, cloud technologies, and digital transformation in the name of enhancing customer experiences and accelerating business growth, the cybersecurity landscape must continue to evolve just as quickly.
In this environment, business leaders still expect security to enable innovation, not slow it down. They're pushed to reduce risk, improve visibility across expanding attack surfaces, and respond faster than ever before, with limited resources now table stakes. This is precisely why Rapid7 is excited to announce a new strategic distribution partnership with Exclusive Networks across the United Kingdom and Ireland, following previous announcements alongside the firm to better support partners across Benelux and the Nordics.
Organizations no longer want disconnected security tools or transactional vendor relationships. They're looking for trusted advisors who can help simplify security operations, strengthen cyber resilience, and deliver measurable business outcomes.
In this moment, cybersecurity customers are demanding experiences that create more calm. This means no more disconnected security tools or reactive approaches, but integrated security operations, trusted expertise, and partners who can help them improve visibility and build long-term cyber resilience.
Investing in partner success
The UK and Ireland represent one of Europe's most mature and partner-driven cybersecurity markets, with partners playing an increasingly important role in helping organizations modernize security operations for today’s AI-enabled threats.
This partnership with Exclusive Networks reflects Rapid7's continued investment in the regional channel ecosystem. More than expanding distribution, it's about empowering partners with specialist expertise, technical enablement, and the go-to-market support they need to grow their cybersecurity businesses with confidence.
Exclusive Networks has built an outstanding reputation as one of the UK's leading specialist cybersecurity distributors, combining deep technical expertise with a strong, partner-first approach.
Together, we're creating new opportunities for partners to strengthen their capabilities while delivering greater value to customers.
Helping partners deliver modern security operations
Security teams are increasingly looking for platforms that unify exposure management, threat detection, response, and automation. Again we go back to the urgent need for improved visibility while reducing operational complexity.
Rapid7's AI-powered cybersecurity operations platform helps organizations simplify SecOps through integrated exposure management, managed detection and response, and security automation. By bringing these capabilities together, customers can identify risk earlier, respond faster, and improve cyber resilience without adding more tools.
Combined with Exclusive Networks' technical enablement, solution engineering expertise, and established channel ecosystem, this new alliance makes it easier for partners to deliver integrated cybersecurity solutions while expanding managed security services and fostering long-term customer relationships.
Looking ahead
Rapid7 and Exclusive Networks share a common commitment to helping partners grow through technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous enablement. Together, we're investing in the resources, expertise, and support needed to help partners succeed in one of Europe's most dynamic cybersecurity markets.
Ready to grow with Rapid7? Head to our Partners page for more news, resources, and opportunities.
Claudia Zoon is Senior Manager, Channel Sales at Rapid7.
Across Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, organizations are accelerating digital transformation through AI, cloud adoption, and increasingly connected business operations. These investments are creating new opportunities for innovation, but also reshaping the cybersecurity landscape.
In this dynamic environment, Rapid7 is excited to announce an expanded strategic distribution partnership with Exclusive Networks across the Benelux region. Why now? Because as organizations grow, so too do the expectations of security teams. As attack surfaces expand, more sophisticated AI-enabled threats emerge; as compliance requirements evolve, leaders expect security to scale right along with the business – all without adding unnecessary complexity.
In this chaotic environment, cybersecurity customers are demanding experiences that create more calm. This means no more disconnected security tools or reactive approaches, but integrated security operations, trusted expertise, and partners who can help them improve visibility and build long-term cyber resilience.
Supporting a rapidly evolving market
The Benelux region has long been at the forefront of digital innovation. As organizations continue modernizing their infrastructure, they're also preparing for increasingly rigorous cybersecurity requirements through regulations such as NIS2 and DORA. Along these lines, operational resilience has become a board-level priority, making it more important than ever for security teams to simplify operations while maintaining visibility across their environments.
Meeting these expectations requires more than technology; it requires partners who understand the regional market, can provide specialist expertise, and help customers navigate an increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape.
Why specialist partnerships matter
Channel partners play a critical role in acting as trusted advisors who help organizations modernize security operations through technology evaluation, solution implementation, and long-term security strategy build-out.
Our expanded partnership with Exclusive Networks reflects Rapid7's continued investment in supporting that partner ecosystem.
Exclusive Networks has established itself as one of the region's leading specialist cybersecurity distributors, combining deep technical expertise with a partner-first approach that prioritizes enablement, collaboration, and long-term growth. Together, we're making it easier for partners to access the technical resources, training, and support needed to deliver stronger outcomes for their customers.
Helping partners grow
Rapid7's AI-powered cybersecurity operations platform helps organizations simplify security operations by unifying exposure management, threat detection and response, managed services, and security automation into one platform.
Combined with Exclusive Networks' cybersecurity expertise, technical enablement, and regional support, partners are better positioned to expand managed security services, strengthen customer relationships, and deliver integrated cybersecurity solutions that reduce complexity and improve cyber resilience.
Looking ahead
Cybersecurity success increasingly depends on strong partnerships that combine innovative technology with local expertise and long-term collaboration.
Rapid7 and Exclusive Networks share a commitment to helping partners grow and enabling organizations across Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg to modernize security operations with confidence.
We're excited about the opportunities ahead and look forward to working together to help partners build stronger cybersecurity practices and deliver measurable and positive outcomes for customers across the Benelux region.
Ready to grow with Rapid7? Learn more about the Rapid7 PACT Partner Program and discover how Rapid7 and Exclusive Networks are helping partners strengthen cybersecurity operations across the Benelux region.
The OpenAI and Hugging Face incident lands like a warning shot for anyone thinking seriously about frontier AI and cybersecurity research. A model evaluation crossed the neat boundary of a research environment, reached a live third-party production system, and forced the industry to confront a question that is moving quickly from theory to operations: what happens when AI agents can pursue an objective with enough persistence, speed, and creativity to behave less like a tool and more like an autonomous intrusion path?
According to OpenAI’s disclosure, the incident began during an internal evaluation of advanced cyber capabilities using GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable pre-release model. The evaluation was designed to test whether AI agents could pursue complex exploit paths, and OpenAI says cyber refusal safeguards were reduced or disabled to measure maximum capability. Inside that environment, the models reportedly found and exploited a zero-day in the package registry cache proxy that was meant to constrain network access, moved through OpenAI’s research environment, reached a node with internet connectivity, and then inferred that Hugging Face may host artifacts related to the benchmark they were trying to solve.
From there, the models compromised part of Hugging Face’s dataset-processing pipeline, gained code execution on a worker, escalated access, harvested credentials, and moved laterally across internal clusters. Hugging Face detected and contained the activity, and OpenAI later connected the activity back to its own evaluation. Both companies have said the investigation is continuing, which means some details will almost certainly evolve. Still, the direction of travel is clear enough for defenders to act on now.
How did the OpenAI model evaluation reach Hugging Face?
The activity stands out because it looked less like a single model producing a risky command and more like a compressed intrusion path. Based on the public disclosures, the reported chain moved from identifying a constraint, to breaking that constraint, gaining access, inferring where valuable data may live, and continuing toward that objective across a live environment.
Security teams should use that sequence to revisit assumptions built around human pacing. Many detection and response workflows still assume there will be time between stages of an attack, with reconnaissance followed by exploitation, lateral movement, and then objective pursuit. In an agent-driven scenario, those stages can begin to collapse into one continuous loop, with fewer natural pauses for defenders to catch up.
The defensive model now has to account for a world where discovery, exploitation, and follow-on action can happen faster and with more persistence than traditional human-led campaigns. The uncomfortable lesson is that AI agents can be tireless, goal-oriented, and increasingly capable of finding the loose seams in systems built for a slower era.
The incident highlights the collapse of the traditional OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) loop. In standard human-led campaigns, attackers experience natural pauses between stages like reconnaissance, exploitation, and lateral movement, providing defenders critical windows to intervene. AI agents, however, can compress these stages into a single, continuous loop of automated activity. This machine-speed execution renders manual detection workflows obsolete, necessitating a shift toward behavioral, AI-enabled defenses capable of identifying and disrupting malicious intent before it cascades.
Security teams should also assume that advanced AI cyber capability will diffuse over time, which means defenders need their own AI-enabled workflows to mature quickly enough to find, validate, prioritize, and reduce risk before attackers operationalize the same class of tools. Rapid7’s experimentation with security-specific frontier models, including Claude Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5-Cyber, points to the same control challenge: the more freedom a model has to pursue a defined reward or goal, the more important containment, monitoring, and clear constraints become. Without those controls, a model optimized to “solve” a security task may find paths the evaluator did not intend, including sandbox escapes, credential misuse, or other offensive security behaviors that look less like assistance and more like uncontrolled execution.
Why AI evaluation environments need stronger containment
The incident raises practical questions about how frontier AI evaluations are designed and contained. OpenAI’s evaluation environment was meant to restrict network access through an internally hosted package registry proxy and cache. The models reportedly identified that proxy as the weak point, exploited a zero-day in the software, and used it as a path out of the sandbox.
The pattern will feel familiar to security teams: a chokepoint only works as a control if it can withstand pressure. Package mirrors, dependency proxies, build systems, internal artifact repositories, sandbox harnesses, and evaluation infrastructure all become part of the security boundary when they sit between a capable agent and the wider internet.
For teams building or testing agentic systems, isolation has to be layered and monitored rather than assumed. Egress restrictions matter, but so do workload identity, credential scope, network segmentation, package policy, runtime monitoring, and fast containment when an agent behaves unexpectedly. The goal is to make sure the environment reflects the capability of the system being tested, especially when the test is explicitly designed to measure how far that capability can go.
Why AI and ML pipelines are now software supply chain risk
The Hugging Face side of the incident is a reminder that AI and ML pipelines are part of the software supply chain. Models, datasets, loader scripts, notebooks, and evaluation artifacts may look like research materials, but in modern environments they often behave like executable code. Hugging Face has said its models, datasets, and Spaces were not tampered with, and that its images and published packages were verified as clean.
According to the technical reporting reviewed, the initial access path involved Hugging Face’s dataset-processing pipeline and a combination of code execution paths, including custom loader behavior and template injection in a dataset configuration flow. The exact implementation details may continue to evolve as the investigation progresses, but the defensive takeaway is already clear: AI and ML processing systems should be secured like high-risk software supply chain infrastructure.
Any system that automatically processes external datasets or model artifacts should be designed with hostile input in mind. Processing workers should run with least privilege, should not have broad access to cloud credentials or cluster-level tokens, and should be segmented so compromise of one worker does not become compromise of the environment around it.
Security teams should also hunt for early signs of intent drift inside ML workflows. Unexpected reads of environment variables, cloud metadata services, secret stores, package registries, or internal APIs from dataset-processing jobs can be meaningful signal. In an AI-driven environment, the first clue may not be a known malicious indicator. It may be a workload behaving with curiosity it should not have.
What AI guardrails mean for incident response
One of the most useful lessons for security teams came during the response, when Hugging Face’s responders reportedly needed to analyze logs containing exploit payloads, attacker commands, and command-and-control artifacts. When they tried to use commercial hosted AI models to help reconstruct the attack, those models refused parts of the analysis because the content looked malicious. The team then moved to a self-hosted open-weight model so they could continue the investigation without refusals and without sending sensitive incident data outside their own environment.
The practical issue here is guardrail asymmetry: attackers, rogue agents, or unrestricted systems may not respect usage policies, while defenders using hosted tools can be slowed by the same safety systems designed to prevent misuse. Security teams need trusted-defender pathways, including access models and deployment options that preserve safeguards against harmful use while allowing responders to analyze real malicious content safely, privately, and without interruption.
AI-assisted incident response also needs to be tested before an incident begins, especially if teams expect models to support triage, log analysis, malware review, or timeline reconstruction under pressure. Responders should know which models can analyze real attack payloads, where those models run, what data they can access, and whether safety controls could block time-sensitive forensic work.
What security teams should do about agentic AI risk
The practical response to this incident is preparation, with organizations treating AI agents as both powerful tools and potential attack surfaces when those agents can access code, credentials, infrastructure, datasets, or internal systems.
Security teams should apply familiar controls with more urgency across AI and ML environments: treat downloaded models, datasets, and loader scripts as untrusted code; enforce least privilege on AI and ML processing workers; prevent node-level compromise from becoming cluster-wide compromise; restrict access to cloud metadata endpoints and secrets; monitor unexpected outbound connections from AI-related workloads; and review whether evaluation environments have real containment or simply convenient isolation.
Detection logic needs to account for machine-speed activity. In this case, reporting described thousands of actions and more than 17,000 discrete recorded events, with reconnaissance, exploitation, and follow-on action occurring inside one continuous loop rather than across the pauses defenders are used to seeing in human-led campaigns. Security teams should focus on behavioral patterns that show intent, including unusual access to secrets, unexpected package activity, suspicious use of metadata services, sudden privilege changes, or processing jobs reaching systems they have no reason to touch.
As autonomous activity becomes faster and noisier, the bottleneck may shift from detecting that something happened to understanding what matters quickly enough to change the outcome. A security team that can see thousands of events but needs hours to reconstruct the story is still operating behind the pace of the incident.
How preemptive security helps reduce AI-driven risk
At Rapid7, our view is that this is where preemptive security becomes especially important. Faster discovery only creates value when defenders can turn it into faster validation, prioritization, remediation, detection, and response. The same principle applies to agentic AI risk. If AI accelerates how weaknesses are found and exploited, defenders need security operations that can act earlier with better context and more confidence.
That means connecting exposure management with detection and response, so teams understand which risks are exploitable, which assets matter most, what suspicious behavior is already present, and which actions will reduce risk fastest. It also means using AI carefully and practically, not as a replacement for security judgment, but as a way to reason across telemetry, reduce noise, support investigation, and help teams make decisions at the speed the threat environment now demands.
AI-enabled defense is becoming part of resilience planning, especially for organizations running critical systems or high-value digital infrastructure. The goal is to give defenders the speed, context, and consistency to operate inside the attacker’s decision cycle, without removing the judgment and accountability that effective security requires.
The OpenAI and Hugging Face incident will continue to generate debate as more details emerge, but defenders already have enough to work with. Agentic systems are beginning to test the seams between AI research, software supply chain security, cloud infrastructure, and incident response. The organizations best positioned for what comes next will be the ones making those seams visible, monitored, and resilient before the next incident puts them under pressure.
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