Cygrid vs Mindgard

About Mindgard

Mindgard secures AI models, agents, and applications against exploitable threats. Mindgard combines offensive security expertise, AI red teaming, attacker intelligence, and automated protection to help organizations discover, assess, and mitigate risk across AI models, agents, and applications. Mindgard was created from more than a decade of AI security research at Lancaster University. Mindgard was founded on pioneering research by Dr. Peter Garraghan at Lancaster University, which showed traditional AppSec could not address AI-specific risks. Mindgard's research has produced 150+ publicly disclosed AI vulnerabilities.^[1][5]

The Mindgard AI security platform finds, validates, and fixes high-impact AI vulnerabilities. Mindgard operates as an autonomous red teamer, continuously mapping, planning, and executing complex, agentic attack workflows. Mindgard profiles AI systems the way attackers do, mapping models, agents, tools, and behaviors before attack execution. Mindgard automates recon and intelligence gathering on AI systems before adversarial testing to discover instructions, tools, and behaviors attackers can exploit. Mindgard identifies AI models, agents, MCP/A2A servers, connected tools, and shadow AI within products. Mindgard tests AI applications, agents and LLMs, including image, audio and multi-modal models. Mindgard uses reconnaissance and agentic attacks to identify how an attacker could manipulate an agent, access sensitive information, misuse tools, bypass controls, or chain weaknesses together.^[1][4][13]

Mindgard validates which weaknesses are exploitable, explains their potential impact, and provides evidence and guidance to help teams close them. AI guardrails and firewalls apply policies to prompts, responses, or actions at runtime, and Mindgard tests whether those controls actually work. Mindgard assesses agents, tools, permissions, APIs, data, and infrastructure beyond the prompt layer. Mindgard evaluates and strengthens AI guardrails and WAF solutions against vulnerabilities.^[1][13]

Mindgard deploys through CI/CD, Burp Suite, or a single click. Mindgard integrates into existing workflows with CI/CD automation and a Burp Suite extension. Mindgard uses APIs and integrations to secure models, agents, and AI applications across development and production environments. Mindgard routes findings through APIs, CI/CD, and enterprise workflow integrations into existing security tooling, ticketing systems, and engineering workflows. Mindgard integrates report viewing into existing systems and SIEM. Mindgard supports SAML/SSO, SCIM provisioning, and RBAC to align security testing with organizational compliance standards.^{[1][4][13][14][15]}

Mindgard generates evidence, remediation guidance, and audit-ready reports mapped to OWASP, MITRE, NIST, and AIUC-1. Mindgard discovers and inventories AI applications, models, agents, and shadow AI across an entire environment. Mindgard prioritizes findings by severity, exposure, affected target, business context, and urgency of remediation. Mindgard gives security, engineering, GRC, and audit teams reporting they can use to demonstrate that AI risks and controls are being continuously evaluated. Security teams use Mindgard to discover and remediate high impact risk.^[4][15]

Mindgard researchers attack AI systems the way a motivated adversary would, using prompt injection, agent hijacking, tool abuse, data extraction and guardrail bypass, chained into attack paths. Mindgard red teams the whole AI system, not just the model. A single LLM application typically takes two to three weeks from kickoff to report in a Mindgard AI pentest. Mindgard sells a dedicated Technical Account Manager as an annual subscription. Mindgard's AI Security Expert subscription gives a team direct access to a specialist. Mindgard training includes instructor-led workshops where teams build agents, test attacks, configure guardrails, and harden defenses.^{[6][7][8][9][10][13]}

A US insurance brokerage used Mindgard to secure nine production AI models. Mindgard secured Fortune 500 design partners. Mindgard expanded its leadership with CEO James Brear, Head of Research Aaron Portnoy, and Offensive Security Lead Rich Smith. Mindgard lists SOC 2 Type 2. Mindgard says 86% of its staff are on the R&D team and 38% hold PhDs.^{[1][5][6][7][8][9][10][13][14]}