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Banco Santander’s Daniel Cuthbert on Exploitability, Attack Surfaces and AI

Anna Delaney (annamadeline) •
August 17, 2026    

Daniel Cuthbert, global head, cyber security research, Banco Santander, and associate fellow, RUSI

Artificial intelligence has lowered the barrier to vulnerability research, enabling more people to hunt for bugs and driving a surge in findings. Security teams must distinguish bugs from exploitable vulnerabilities and respond faster, said Daniel Cuthbert, global head of cyber security research at Banco Santander and associate fellow at RUSI.

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CISOs still need the fundamentals: Know the attack surface, identify what can be fixed and apply mitigating controls when patches aren’t available, Cuthbert said. But AI is changing the speed of discovery, and traditional patching can no longer keep up.

“Patching cadence has to drastically change. If I were a CISO today, I would say, ‘How do we move from a weekly, monthly, quarterly patching-type process to an almost 12-hour period, or maybe even less?'” Cuthbert said.

In this video interview with ISMG at Black Hat USA 2026, Cuthbert also discussed:

Why stronger authentication could raise the cost of attacks;
How the Raptor security research framework validates flaws and generates patches instead of exploit code;
Why networking, hardware and secure development research deserves renewed attention.

Cuthbert has more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity research, threat intelligence and offensive cyber operations for corporate and government sectors. Before joining Banco Santander, he was COO at SensePost, where he led global operations, research direction and technical capability standards.