Guest: Chris Wallis
Company: Intruder
Show: Secure By Design
Topics: Cloud Security, Cybersecurity

Modern enterprises face a paradox: as their tech stacks become more sophisticated, they also become harder to secure. Cloud sprawl, hybrid environments, and Shadow IT are expanding attack surfaces faster than security teams can track them, leaving blind spots that attackers love to exploit.

Chris Wallis, Founder and CEO of Intruder, has spent the past decade solving this problem. His London-based company serves 3,000 customers worldwide with an exposure management platform designed to help organizations stop breaches before they start. What started as a tool for smaller companies has now become essential for mid-market enterprises facing the same threat actors as Fortune 500 companies, just with far fewer resources.

From Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management

The industry is shifting from vulnerability management to exposure management, and the evolution isn’t just semantic. Traditional vulnerability management focused on finding and fixing every vulnerability, an impossible task for any organization. Exposure management brings context to the equation: which vulnerabilities are exploitable, which are in production versus test systems, and what damage could they cause if exploited.

“Realistically, there’s not an organization on the planet that can fix all of their vulnerabilities,” Wallis explains. “Exposure management is about fixing the vulnerabilities that matter. When we say it’s critical, you know you need to act fast.”

The urgency is real. Attackers are moving faster than ever. Where organizations once had a month to patch a new vulnerability, those timelines have collapsed to days or hours. The Redis vulnerability that dropped on Christmas Day 2024 perfectly illustrated the problem: a new exploit emerged when teams weren’t working, creating a critical window of opportunity for attackers.

Intruder’s response is proactive emerging threat scans. As soon as a new vulnerability surfaces, the platform automatically scans customers and alerts them if they’re affected, drastically reducing the window of opportunity for exploitation.

Attack Surface Management Beyond Scanning

What sets Intruder apart from traditional vulnerability scanners is its approach to attack surface management. Where conventional tools might flag a database as an informational issue, Intruder takes a different stance.

“We will say, okay, that’s a database, but you’ve left it facing the internet,” Wallis notes. “We don’t think that’s a very good idea because it might be secure now, but someone could find a vulnerability in it tomorrow.”

This philosophy extends to admin panels, firewall interfaces, and thousands of other services that shouldn’t be exposed to the internet. By highlighting what shouldn’t be public in the first place, Intruder provides preemptive protection against future exploits.

The challenge of maintaining visibility has grown exponentially. Marketing teams spin up campaign websites. Developers create test environments. Companies make acquisitions without fully understanding the acquired attack surface. Cloud platforms enable rapid system deployment, often without security team oversight.

Intruder’s discovery capabilities address all these scenarios, from unauthorized firewall changes to mergers and acquisitions where organizations need immediate visibility into newly acquired assets.

The Delegation Advantage

Intruder’s 81% enterprise customer growth is driven by more than just technology. It’s about workflow transformation.

Security teams have traditionally operated as bottlenecks, running scans, distributing results via spreadsheets, and coordinating fixes. For organizations of 500 to 2,000 employees with security teams of just three or four people, this model doesn’t scale.

Intruder’s platform enables delegation. Developers and IT teams log in directly, run scans, and implement fixes. Security teams become overseers rather than gatekeepers, watching SLAs and intervening only when needed.

The results are dramatic: customers who onboard their entire teams resolve issues nearly twice as fast as those who don’t. Add automation and integration features, and the workload reduction becomes even more significant.

Consolidation is another driver. Enterprises often use multiple tools for attack surface discovery, vulnerability management, and cloud security. Intruder’s unified platform replaces this fragmented approach, covering external attack surfaces, web applications, APIs, and cloud security in one place.

AI’s Role in Context and Correlation

Intruder is exploring AI across multiple dimensions. One application correlates vulnerabilities with cloud access. Given a TerraForm script and vulnerability data from developer laptops, AI can determine that a vulnerability on one developer’s machine is more critical because that person has broader cloud system access.

“That kind of correlation of vulnerabilities with context is what leads to the term exposure management being more than just vulnerability management,” Wallis says.

AI also performs last-mile investigation, acting like a junior penetration tester. When scanners find an SQL injection, AI can determine whether it’s a false positive or a genuine pathway to production data. For organizations without junior analysts on staff, this doesn’t replace a role — it adds capability they never had.

Reporting for CISOs

Beyond finding vulnerabilities, Intruder focuses on managing outcomes. How quickly do issues get fixed? Is the threat posture improving over time? Are teams meeting SLAs?

Traditional tools excel at discovery but often fail at management. Intruder’s reporting suite helps security leaders paint a clear picture for their teams and boards, showing risk profiles, progress trends, and resolution velocity.

Looking Ahead

As 2026 progresses, Intruder’s roadmap centers heavily on AI. The company is working on correlating issues across the platform, investigating scan results like a junior analyst would, and adding intelligence that mid-market enterprises typically lack the resources to hire.

For Chris Wallis, the mission remains clear: help organizations that aren’t Fortune 500 companies defend themselves against Fortune 500-level threats. With attack timelines collapsing and surfaces expanding, automated exposure management isn’t a luxury — it’s survival.