My AI pentest agent reported 23 root shells. It had actually popped zero.
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An autonomous penetration-testing agent built with an LLM driving nmap, Metasploit, and hydra initially hallucinated 23 root shells on a Metasploitable VM when zero were achieved, due to a flawed validator that matched searchsploit headers and banner text as evidence of compromise. Replacing the heuristic with a `breach_confirmed()` function that checks for real shell markers like `uid=0(root)` reduced claims to 3 confirmed shells, while fixing silent plumbing bugs—MCP schema mismatches, ANSI escape codes in module names, version-string parsing errors, and a 300-second timeout causing 5-minute stalls—enabled the agent to land three real root shells.