Autonomous Determination of Characteristic(s) and/or Configuration(s) of a Remote Computing Resource to Inform Operation of an Autonomous System Used to Evaluate Preparedness of an Organization to Attacks or Reconnaissance Effort by Antagonistic Third Parties

A method of distributing computational work to worker nodes of a pool of worker nodes of a system configured for remote discovery of a configuration of a remote computing resource, the method comprising:

• selecting a computational task from a set of computational tasks to be performed by at least one worker node of the pool of worker nodes;
• submitting a first request to the pool of worker nodes to execute the computational task by at least one worker node of the pool of worker nodes;
• upon determining that the computational task has successfully executed, providing a result of the computational task as input to a detector service configured to output a statistical confidence that the remote computing resource is configured according to a particular software configuration;
• selecting a next computational task from the set of computational tasks based on the particular software configuration;
• and
• submitting a second request to the pool of worker nodes to execute the next computational task by at least one worker node of the pool of worker nodes.

A method of distributing computational work to worker nodes of a pool of worker nodes of a system configured for remote discovery of a configuration of a remote computing resource accessible at a remote address, the method comprising:

• selecting a computational task to be performed by a worker node of the pool of worker nodes, the computational task selected based on a characteristic of the remote address;
• defining the computational task as a selected computational task;
• and
• recursively:
• requesting to execute the selected computational task by at least one worker node of the pool of worker nodes;
• obtaining a result of the computational task from a result database;
• providing the result of the computational task as input to a detector service configured to output a statistical confidence that the remote computing resource is configured according to a particular software configuration;
• upon determining that the statistical confidence exceeds a threshold, selecting a next computational task to be performed by a worker node of the pool of worker nodes, the computational task selected based on the particular software configuration;
• and
• defining the next computational task as the selected computational task.