Digital Encode a Nigerian cybersecurity professional services firm, has launched DEPAS AI, an autonomous enterprise penetration testing platform designed to help organisations detect and address cybersecurity vulnerabilities before they are exploited by cybercriminals.
The company announced the launch as artificial intelligence continues to increase the scale and sophistication of cyberattacks globally.
Digital Encode said DEPAS AI, which stands for Digital Encode Penetration Autonomous System, was developed to move organisations from periodic and largely manual security assessments towards continuous, autonomous cyber resilience.
According to the company, the platform deploys specialised artificial intelligence security agents that operate concurrently across an organisation’s attack surface.
An agentic coordinator oversees the testing process, maintains context of the system being assessed, analyses results in real time and deploys additional agents where necessary to achieve deeper coverage.
Digital Encode said each identified vulnerability is independently reproduced by a verification agent to reduce false positives.
The platform also uses a proprietary chain-builder to connect individual vulnerabilities into potential attack chains, allowing organisations to understand how multiple weaknesses could be exploited sequentially by attackers.
DEPAS AI is designed to autonomously test enterprise applications, web applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), mobile applications, backend systems, cloud environments and network/IP infrastructure.
Prof. Obadare, Chief Visionary Officer at Digital Encode, said the rapid adoption of AI by cybercriminals was changing the cybersecurity landscape and creating pressure on organisations to strengthen their defensive capabilities.
“AI is now being weaponized by attackers to move faster than human teams can respond,” he said.
According to him, DEPAS AI combines artificial intelligence with human intelligence to provide organisations with greater speed and scale in cybersecurity defence.
“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,” Obadare said.
Digital Encode identified four major capabilities of the platform, including autonomous testing, verified accuracy, attack-chain mapping and actionable security outcomes.
The autonomous testing capability provides continuous testing across applications, cloud infrastructure and network assets.
The verified accuracy feature independently validates identified vulnerabilities, while attack-chain mapping connects separate weaknesses into potential real-world exploitation paths.
The platform also generates executive-ready reports, remediation guidance and compliance mapping to help organisations prioritise and address identified risks.
Digital Encode said the development was informed by the growing threat posed by AI-enabled cybercrime.
The company cited findings from IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report, which it said found that AI-enabled breaches accounted for 25 per cent of malicious incidents, representing a 56 per cent year-on-year increase.
According to the figures cited by the company, the average cost of such breaches reached 6.04 million dollars, compared with a global average of 4.99 million dollars.
The company said the figures underscored the growing financial and operational risks associated with AI-driven cyberattacks.
Digital Encode said DEPAS AI would enable enterprises in Nigeria and other parts of the world to continuously detect, prioritise and remediate vulnerabilities before cybercriminals could exploit them.
The company described the platform as part of its broader effort to strengthen cybersecurity resilience as organisations increasingly adopt artificial intelligence and other digital technologies.
