Phil Whitby, Author at Synack

Phil Whitby

Senior Director of Engineering, AI Products

Phil Whitby is Senior Director of Engineering, AI Products at Synack, the leading platform for human and agentic AI-powered penetration testing. One of Synack’s first full-time engineers, he has spent his career building systems that turn raw security findings into proven, actionable risk, and now leads the engineering behind Synack’s AI pentesting products.

At Synack he has built and scaled engineering teams across data engineering, asset management and automated vulnerability testing. His current focus is the hard part of AI security testing: designing systems that do not just find vulnerabilities but prove which ones are genuinely exploitable, safely and at enterprise scale.

He writes about AI pentesting, exploitability validation, and the engineering it takes to get from discovery to proven risk.

AI Can Find Vulnerabilities. Building a System That Proves Risk Is the Hard Part.

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Sep 7, 2026

AI Can Find Vulnerabilities. Building a System That Proves Risk Is the Hard Part.

AI changed the economics of finding vulnerabilities Automated systems can now run reconnaissance, enumerate services, generate hypotheses about where a weakness might be, and test many of them in parallel. Work that once took a skilled tester a week can be attempted in an afternoon, across far more of an environment than a fixed-scope engagement […]

Phil Whitby

6 min read

Phil Whitby

Research by Phil Whitby

AI Can Find Vulnerabilities. Building a System That Proves Risk Is the Hard Part.