Always On Security Coverage with Hermes Agent and Claude Cybersecurity Skills

Here is the Big Problem : We don't have 24x7 Always on Security in most organizations. Security doesn't take weekends off. Attackers don't either. But most security teams do — not because they want to, but because continuous monitoring at human scale is expensive, exhausting, and simply out of reach for most organizations.

That's the gap we've been thinking about at Casky. And a project from NousResearch called Hermes Agent just gave us a compelling way to close it.

What is Hermes Agent?

Hermes Agent is a persistent AI agent framework built by NousResearch. Unlike a chatbot you prompt and wait for, Hermes Agent runs continuously, it wakes up on a schedule, executes tasks, reasons about what it finds, and takes action without you needing to be in the loop for every step.

It's part of a broader shift toward what researchers are calling "always-on" agents — AI systems that operate as background processes rather than on-demand tools. A recent comparison of persistent agent frameworks puts Hermes Agent in the same category as tools like AutoGen and CrewAI, but with a tighter focus on tool use and structured reasoning loops.

The key properties that matter for security work:

• Persistence — it maintains state across runs, so it can track changes over time
• Tool use — it calls external APIs and executes structured tasks
• Scheduled execution — runs on a cron-style schedule, not just when you ask it to
• Reasoning loops — it can evaluate findings, prioritize by severity, and decide what to escalate

What are Claude Cybersecurity Skills?

Claude Cybersecurity Skills are pre-built agentic tasks that run a Claude model against a security target and return structured findings. Each skill is scoped to a specific framework and purpose:

• OWASP Top 10 scan — crawls a web application and maps vulnerabilities to all 10 OWASP risk categories
• MITRE ATT&CK coverage gap analysis — compares your detection rules against the full ATT&CK technique library
• NIST CSF 2.0 readiness audit — scores your environment across the six CSF functions (Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover)
• Threat intelligence correlation — identifies patterns in your logs consistent with known APT behaviors

Each skill returns CVSS scores, framework mappings, and concrete remediation steps — not just raw output but actionable intelligence.

The problem with periodic security reviews

Traditional security assessments happen on a schedule: quarterly pentest, annual audit, ad-hoc scan when something looks wrong. The gap between assessments is where attackers live.

MITRE ATT&CK documents over 600 adversary techniques. CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog adds dozens of new entries every month. The threat surface changes daily but your last OWASP scan might be three months old.

The problem isn't that teams don't care. It's that continuous security monitoring has always required continuous human attention. Until now.

What changes when you combine them

When Hermes Agent orchestrates Claude Cybersecurity Skills, you get a security workflow that:

Runs on your schedule. Configure Hermes Agent to run an OWASP scan every night at 2am, a MITRE coverage audit every Monday, and a NIST posture check on the first of every month. It runs whether you're in the office or not.

Raises alerts automatically. Critical findings don't wait for a report. Hermes Agent can post to Slack, send an email, or write to a ticketing system the moment a high-severity finding appears.

Tracks drift over time. Because the agent maintains state, it knows what was clean last week. New findings are flagged as regressions. Resolved issues are confirmed resolved. You get a trending view of your security posture, not just a point-in-time snapshot.

Suggests fixes in context. Claude doesn't just identify a vulnerability — it explains the remediation path, references the relevant CWE or CVE, and can generate a draft patch or configuration change for human review.

Why this matters for teams without a SOC

Enterprise security teams have 24x7 operations centers with analysts watching dashboards. Most companies — startups, mid-market, NGOs, research institutions don't. They have one security-aware engineer who also does three other jobs.

For those teams, Hermes Agent running Claude Cybersecurity Skills isn't a replacement for expertise. It's leverage. It handles the surveillance layer: continuous scanning, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, so the human expert can focus on the findings that actually need judgment, not on remembering to run the scan.

What's next in this series

This is the first of three posts. In the next installment, we'll walk through the exact setup: how to install and configure Hermes Agent, how to connect it to the Casky skill endpoints, and how we've structured our playground lab for experimentation.

In the third post, we'll share what we actually found — real results from running this combination against our test environment, including some surprises.

If you want early access to Claude Cybersecurity Skills, join the waitlist at casky.ai. We're onboarding the first cohort now.