My AI Agent Exploited a CVE That Metasploit Couldn't — RedAmon Full Demo

I wanted to stress-test RedAmon — our autonomous security assessment agent — under the worst possible conditions. So I set up a deliberately vulnerable Node.js server running node-serialize 0.0.4 (CVE-2017-5941, CVSS 9.8) and gave the agent a single instruction: "Find a CVE and exploit it." Here's what made this brutally hard: 👇 ❌ The recon database had zero CVEs — no vulnerability data at all ❌ Metasploit had no module for this CVE — search CVE-2017-5941 returned nothing ❌ The agent had to go from zero knowledge to full RCE completely on its own 🤖 Powered by Claude Opus 4.6, here's the autonomous attack chain RedAmon executed in ~20 steps: [1] Queried the knowledge graph for known vulnerabilities — found nothing [2] Queried for hosts, IPs, services — only a bare subdomain, no ports, no tech stack [3] Launched a port scan (naabu) — discovered ports 22 (SSH) and 8080 (HTTP) [4] Fingerprinted port 8080 via HTTP headers — identified Express/Node.js [5] Fetched the full page source — spotted "Node.js 8.x" and "cookie-based serialization with Base64 encoding" [6] Connected the dots: old Node.js + serialized cookies = classic deserialization attack surface [7] Searched the web for CVE-2017-5941 exploit techniques and payloads [8] Found multiple PoCs on Exploit-DB and PayloadsAllTheThings confirming the IIFE-based RCE vector [9] Probed /profile endpoint — confirmed the server sets a Base64-encoded profile cookie [10] Decoded the cookie: {"username":"guest","email":"guest@example.com","role":"viewer"} [11] Understood the full kill chain: cookie → Base64 decode → unserialize() → IIFE execution → RCE [12] Requested phase transition from reconnaissance to exploitation — with a full risk assessment [13] Searched Metasploit for a module — no results [14] Pivoted to manual exploitation (no-module fallback) [15] Crafted a malicious serialized payload with $$ND_FUNC$$ prefix and IIFE [16] First attempt: async exec() — RCE fired server-side but output went to stdout, not HTTP