Your Security Tools Are Failing. A New Report Shows How.

SUNNYVALE, CA – January 14, 2026 – A groundbreaking new report suggests that the billions of dollars enterprises spend on cybersecurity tools may be fostering a dangerous sense of false security. The inaugural "2026 State of the Breach Report" from enterprise exposure validation firm SafeBreach reveals that while many security controls are effective against loud, unsophisticated attacks, they consistently fail to stop the stealthy, identity-based campaigns favored by advanced adversaries.

Based on an analysis of over 1.8 million real-world attack simulations conducted within global enterprises throughout 2025, the report provides a stark, data-driven look at how security defenses perform—or don't—against the threats that matter most. The findings challenge long-held assumptions and signal a critical need for organizations to shift from relying on traditional metrics like alerts generated or patches applied to demanding empirical evidence of their security posture.

The CISO's Reality Check

For years, Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) have struggled to answer a fundamental question from their boards: "Are we secure?" According to the SafeBreach report, the typical answers, which often point to a portfolio of deployed tools, are insufficient. The data reveals a significant gap between perceived protection and actual resilience.

The most jarring finding relates to the performance of different security control categories. While Network Inspection and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls demonstrated respectable threat blockage rates of approximately 65% and 70% respectively, the controls deployed on endpoints—the very devices where employees work and data resides—significantly underperformed. With a blockage rate of only 53%, endpoint security tools missed nearly half of the simulated attacks thrown at them.

"The report's findings on endpoint security are a significant wake-up call," said one independent security analyst who reviewed the data. "Many organizations have a false sense of security based on vendor dashboards, but this empirical data shows the reality is often quite different."

This performance gap becomes even more pronounced when analyzing the type of threat. While defenses were generally successful at stopping noisy, payload-centric ransomware attacks, they struggled against the more subtle techniques used by nation-state actors. For example, tradecraft associated with Russia's GRU showed a 28% miss rate, allowing simulated attackers to slip past defenses more than a quarter of the time.

The Silent Epidemic: Identity Attacks and Credential Exposure

The report digs deeper to uncover why these advanced threats are so successful, and the answer lies in a pervasive and often-overlooked vulnerability: compromised identity. The research found that a staggering 60% of organizations had exposed harvestable credentials, including plain-text passwords and sensitive information stored in the Windows Registry.

This widespread credential exposure is a goldmine for attackers. Once they gain an initial foothold, these credentials act as a key to unlock the kingdom, enabling them to escalate privileges and move laterally across a network with ease, often appearing as legitimate user activity. This tactic effectively bypasses many traditional security tools that are designed to spot overtly malicious files or network traffic, not a user logging in with valid (albeit stolen) credentials.

These findings align with a growing consensus among security experts that identity has become the new perimeter. Threat intelligence frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK are heavily populated with techniques related to credential access and abuse, confirming their prevalence in real-world breaches. The SafeBreach report provides the empirical data to prove it, demonstrating that attackers who focus on identity abuse have a much higher chance of evading enterprise defenses.

Architecture Matters: The Case for Integrated Security

The report also offers a clear verdict on a long-standing debate in security architecture: integrated platforms outperform fragmented, best-of-breed toolsets. Organizations with centralized, integrated security stacks demonstrated consistently stronger resilience against simulated attacks, regardless of their overall budget or the number of tools they had deployed.

In contrast, environments with fragmented security controls, particularly those common in mixed IT and Operational Technology (OT) settings or those relying heavily on a patchwork of endpoint solutions, struggled to prevent attacks. This fragmentation creates visibility gaps, complicates threat correlation, and slows down response times, allowing attackers to exploit the seams between disconnected systems.

This insight suggests that the path to better security isn't necessarily paved with more spending, but with smarter, more strategic integration. For CISOs, this provides a data-backed argument for consolidating security vendors and investing in platforms that provide a holistic view of the attack surface, breaking down the silos that attackers so readily exploit.

From Reactive to Resilient: The Rise of Continuous Validation

While the report paints a concerning picture of enterprise defenses, it also illuminates a clear path forward. The most resilient organizations were not defined by their budget or maturity level, but by their operational practices. Specifically, organizations that adopted a continuous cycle of validating their controls with attack simulations, remediating the identified gaps, and re-validating their fixes showed rapid and measurable improvement.

This approach, which forms the basis of the Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) market, treats security not as a static milestone but as a dynamic and ongoing operational practice.

"Our customers use the data from attack simulations within the SafeBreach platform to easily understand and improve the efficacy of their controls—not by adding more tools or alerts, but by validating whether their existing controls stop real attack paths in practice,” said Guy Bejerano, CEO of SafeBreach, in the press release. He noted that the report's findings are designed to "replace assumptions with empirical evidence about where enterprise controls perform well, where they fail, and how trends differ across industries and architectures."

Ultimately, the 2026 State of the Breach Report serves as a critical guide for security leaders heading into the new year. By providing a data-driven mirror that reflects the true state of their defenses, it urges a fundamental shift in strategy: move beyond assumptions, focus on validating what is already in place, and build resilience by relentlessly testing defenses against the way attackers actually operate.