TrustedSec Joins the OpenAI Daybreak Defense Network

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I have spent most of my career trying to answer a simple question for our clients: if someone came after you today, what would actually happen? A list of findings only gets you so far. You need to understand whether an attacker can reach a weakness, what they could do with it, whether your defenses would catch them, and what you should fix first. That is the work our team loves doing at TrustedSec.

Today, I am excited to share that TrustedSec is joining the OpenAI Daybreak Defense Network. We plan to bring OpenAI models into our consulting work through Daybreak Blue and, where approved, specialized cyber models through Daybreak Red.This gives our people another way to dig into difficult security problems, test ideas, and help clients make better decisions. I am excited about what these capabilities can make possible when they are in the hands of the right practitioners.

Our plans span red teaming, penetration testing, application and cloud security, purple teaming, research, and defensive services. We will use these capabilities to help our consultants understand real exposure, investigate threats, and give clients practical guidance they can act on.

Going Deeper in Red Teaming and Assessments

Daybreak Blue will support defensive analysis and security assessments, while Daybreak Red will support deeper authorized research and adversarial testing where approved. Our consultants will direct the work based on each engagement, and use will be scoped and controlled through customer authorization.

In a red team engagement, the interesting question is rarely whether we can find one vulnerability; it is whether several weaknesses can be chained into a path to reach something that matters. We plan to use these capabilities to explore those paths, test how a client’s defenses hold up, and show where better controls, monitoring, or response would make a difference.

The same thinking applies to penetration testing, application security, and cloud assessments. Model assistance can help our team examine code, configurations, permissions, and trust relationships. Our practitioners will still verify potential findings in the actual environment, explain the impact, and work through what it takes to fix them.

Turning Offensive Work into Better Defenses

One of the things I have always liked about purple teaming is that it closes the loop. You run an exercise, look at what the defenders could see, and improve what they could not. We plan to use Daybreak capabilities to analyze the telemetry from those exercises, find gaps, and develop detections that our consultants and client teams can validate together.

We will also incorporate this with our threat hunting, investigations, and incident response to help analysts organize evidence, connect related activity, and surface leads worth pursuing. Our consultants will check those leads against the evidence and the circumstances of each incident.

“Our clients need to know what actually matters in their environment and what they can do about it,” said Justin Elze, Chief Technology Officer at TrustedSec. “We plan to use Daybreak Blue and Red across red teaming and our broader offensive and defensive work to help our teams dig deeper, validate findings, and turn the results into practical improvements for clients.”

This is where the work gets exciting for me. A red team finding can become a detection. An investigation can show us something we need to test. After a fix, we can go back and see whether it actually closed the original path. Bringing these pieces together can help clients get more out of every engagement.

Our People Will Drive the Work

I have always believed the strength of TrustedSec comes from the people on our team. AI can help them move faster and explore more, but their experience and judgment are what turn a possible finding into an answer a client can trust. As always, they will continue to direct the work, validate results, and own the recommendations.

We will define authorization, scope, data handling, and human review as part of each engagement, and we will evaluate these workflows before expanding their use across our services. Clients need findings that hold up to scrutiny and advice that works in their environment.

I am excited about where this can take us. The goal is straightforward: go deeper, get to the evidence faster, and help our clients make real improvements to their security. I cannot wait to see what our team does with it.