Distributed system for autonomous discovery and exploitation of an organization's computing and/or human resources to evaluate capacity and/or ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate effectiveness of intrusion attempts by, and reconnaissance efforts of, motivated, antagonistic, third parties

A method for remote discovery and evaluation of Internet-connected computing resources administered by an entity, the method comprising:

• receiving, as input, a data item associated with the entity;
• generating a reconnaissance plan based on the data item, the reconnaissance plan comprising a set of jobs, each job defining at least one computational task;
• and iteratively or recursively:
• assigning each respective job to a respective ephemeral worker node;
• and aggregating data resulting from execution of each respective job, and with the aggregated data:
• identifying a computing resource likely administered by the entity;
• identifying an instance of software executed by the computing resource;
• identifying a vulnerability presented by the instance of software;
• and updating an appeal score of the computing resource, the appeal score corresponding to a likelihood of an exploitation attempt by a third party;
• and updating the reconnaissance plan based on the appeal score.

A method for presenting and ranking results of a remote discovery and evaluation operation enumerating computing resources of an entity, the method comprising:

• receiving, at a user interface, a data item identifying the entity;
• generating a reconnaissance plan comprising a set of jobs selected based on the data item;
• iteratively or recursively:
• assigning each respective job of the set of jobs to a respective worker node selected from a pool of geographically distributed instantiated worker nodes;
• and receiving data resulting from each execution of each respective job, and with the received data:
• identifying a computing resource likely administered by the entity;
• identifying an instance of software executed by the computing resource;
• identifying a vulnerability presented by the instance of software;
• and updating or creating an appeal score of the computing resource, the appeal score corresponding to a prediction of attractiveness of the computing resource and vulnerability to an exploitation attempt by a third party;
• updating the reconnaissance plan based on the appeal score;
• and updating the user interface to display information related to at least a subset of identified computing resources, in descending order of appeal score.