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Safety and Impact

This reference page explains how NodeZero manages destructive behavior, operational impact, and agents' activity during WebApp testing. It focuses on the configuration options and runtime controls that you can exercise

Destructive Action Handling

Potentially destructive actions are governed by the application scope, and testing rules that you configure before launching tests, and by the request rate that you set for each. NodeZero is designed to favor bounded test artifacts – such as test posts, bogus data, or stored-payload validation – over uncontrolled destructive actions against customer data.

Mid-Run Stop Controls

A running WebApp test can be stopped from its Real-Time View, using the stop and agents'activity control available for NodeZero It the on options application configuration and pentests. that you can exercise

Expected Logs and Traffic Patterns

WebApp testing typically runs in two broad phases. The first emphasizes enumeration and route discovery, and might resemble accelerated application traffic. The second emphasizes attack execution, and might produce repeated requests to the same URLs and parameters with varied payloads. The attack phase can trigger SOC (Security Operations Center) alerts, WAF (Web Application Firewall) rules, or rate limits.

Traffic Allowlisting

You can allowlist external applications retrieving NodeZero's testing source IP before launching a test, and adding that address or range to the appropriate WAF or perimeter allowlist. NodeZero recommends allowlisting when your goal is to test underlying application behavior, rather than to measure whether perimeter controls block commodity payloads.

Agents in WebApp Tests

NodeZero's core attack engine is grounded in graph-based reasoning and deterministic attack logic. Scoped AI agents support specific tasks, such as application exploration, business-logic analysis, risk prioritization, and data analysis.

In a WebApp test, standard agents perform bounded tasks such as crawling, authentication, TOTP (time-based one-time password) session management, egg planting, and parameter fuzzing. These components are built for repeatability, controlled execution, and production safety. Extended agents provide a higher level of adaptive reasoning to explore applications more deeply.

Extended Agents

Extended agents are AI-driven WebApp testing components that go beyond NodeZero's deterministic attack logic and bounded standard agents.

Standard testing follows defined attack methods: it discovers routes, applies known discovery checks and payloads, and validates exploitable behavior. Extended Agents use observations from the target application to decide which areas to investigate next; they design follow-up requests accordingly. This helps identify complex behavior – including some business-logic weaknesses – that fixed test plans might not anticipate.

Extended agents remain subject to your defined application scope, testing rules, and safety controls. They are not unrestricted or general-purpose agents. Because their behavior is exploratory, and because results can vary between runs, Extended agents are disabled by default when you define your target application as a Production app.

A WebApp test's findings can also initiate post-exploitation chaining across application, infrastructure, cloud, and identity surfaces when the necessary prerequisites exist. For example, the LFI (local file inclusion) chain uses discovered credentials to pivot into infrastructure. Internal pivots require an appropriately placed NodeZero Runner with network connectivity to the target; cloud chains require the relevant cloud credentials to be in scope.

Ensuring Production Safety with Extended Agents

You control a WebApp test's behavior by defining testing rules and corresponding HTTP methods. All testing – agentic or otherwise – is bound by this same set of guardrails.

Guardrails keep activity in scope, limit unsafe behavior, and prevent destructive actions. However, production-safe does not mean that testing makes no changes. Depending on the rules you select, a test might create accounts, submit posts, generate test data, or leave stored payloads. NodeZero logs these artifacts in real time and for post-op review, helping you supplement NodeZero's automated cleanup where necessary.

We encourage you to:

  • Coordinate testing with application owners and your SOC and WAF teams.

  • Review your selected methods before launching a test.

  • Review the log of artifacts after the test.

Applying Extended Agents

To use Extended agents confidently, Horizon3 recommends the following progression:

  1. Start with a staging or non-production application where possible.

  2. If you do begin with a production application, select a single externally facing application, on which you enable Extended Agents without credentials. This approximates the access available to an unauthenticated attacker.

  3. Allowlist NodeZero traffic where a WAF would otherwise block testing.

  4. Review the results and artifacts from this initial test.

  5. Add credentials to expand into authenticated coverage, starting with the least-privileged role before adding higher-privileged roles.

  6. To explore internal applications, deploy a NodeZero Runner that has network connectivity to the target and ongoing internet access.

Guardrails and Ephemerality

Wherever Horizon3 uses AI models, inference runs either through Horizon3-controlled infrastructure or through AWS Bedrock within Horizon3's AWS boundary. Horizon3 does not send raw customer data to external model providers or their APIs. We do not use customer data to train models – with the exception of tuning or training customer-specific models, by customer request, which are shared only with that customer.

Each NodeZero assessment runs in an isolated container. We retain sanitized results for customer access, but we destroy test container is destroyed after completion. Horizon3 may retain raw operational logs for up to five days in an internal S3 bucket for troubleshooting by a small group of privileged engineers, after which all sensitive data is scrubbed or destroyed.