The Inaugural 2026 State of the Breach Report 

To kick off 2026, I’m proud to share that we’ve released the inaugural edition of the SafeBreach State of the Breach Report. This report has roots going back over 11 years when SafeBreach was originally founded. Even then, our goal was always to empower security leaders to better understand the efficacy of their security programs and make data-driven decisions—no more guessing what to do. 

In early 2025, our decade-long, data-driven journey culminated in the launch of the new SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform, which marked the next evolution of our company. This move combined our award-winning breach and attack simulation (BAS) product, SafeBreach Validate, with the innovative capabilities of attack path validation via SafeBreach Propagate. Together, these technologies have been able to provide the most innovative and holistic views of cyber risk available today—and not by adding more alerts or dashboards, but by validating whether existing controls stop real attack paths in practice. 

Not only has this empowered our enterprise customers to make more informed decisions about how to prioritize and remediate their most critical exposures, but it has also provided significant insights into the state of cyber resilience within global enterprise organizations generally. As a result, SafeBreach now has one of the richest bodies of empirical security-control-effectiveness data available today—and we’ve distilled it into our first installment of the SafeBreach State of the Breach Report. 

Our customers include some of the world’s largest financial institutions, technology providers, healthcare networks, manufacturers, and critical infrastructure operators. These are organizations with mature security stacks, layered architectures, and real-world adversaries—not simple lab environments. Over the last year, they executed more than 1.8 million high-fidelity simulations within the SafeBreach Platform based on CISA alerts, nation-state tradecraft, emerging ransomware and infostealers, and industry-specific TTPs. 

The 2026 report takes this data and reveals clear trends about where organizations are effective at stopping attacks and where attackers are silently succeeding. Stealthy behaviors like identity abuse, lateral movement, and AI-driven infostealing top the list, directly impacting how teams should prioritize detection engineering, identity controls, and exposure management. The report also highlights how industry sector and security architecture influence resilience, helping leaders benchmark their own posture against relevant peers. Most importantly, the report surfaces insights CISOs can use to:

• Understand real exposure beyond tool coverage
• Defend security investments with evidence, not anecdotes
• Focus remediation efforts where they measurably reduce risk
• Strengthen operational resilience heading into 2026

As the cybersecurity industry collectively reflects on 2025, there are no shortages of industry reports vying for your attention. However, many of those reports rely on surveys, opinions, or limited slices of telemetry. I believe our 2026 State of the Breach Report is worth a read based on the fact that it:   

• Is grounded in empirical simulation data based on real-world attacker actions, not theoretical models.
  Uses the results of millions of simulations based on real attack behaviors executed in production-scale enterprise environments, rather than surveys, opinions, or limited telemetry.
• Provides never-before-seen insights about how enterprises fared against the year’s high-profile threats.
  Shows how enterprise defenses performed against the attacks that mattered most in 2025, including CISA alerts, AI-generated threats, ransomware campaigns, and nation-state tradecraft.
• Delivers architectural and sector-specific insights.
  Highlights how resilience varies across security architecture types and provides industry-specific benchmarks about which sectors are most resilient and why.
• Incorporates emerging threat categories with real validation data.
  Provides one of the first empirical datasets on enterprise readiness against AI-generated malware, spyware, and infostealers.
• Identifies validation gaps, not just performance gaps.
  Highlights environments organizations are undertesting, enabling CISOs to take action to reduce blind spots and improve continuous readiness.
• Delivers actionable guidance for improving operational resilience.
  Aligns recommendations to executive priorities such as reducing risk, strengthening architecture, and improving measurable control effectiveness.

It’s time we move past traditional security metrics—like alerts generated, patches applied, or tools deployed—that often create a false sense of assurance. What matters is whether your controls stop real attacks in your environment. The SafeBreach 2026 State of the Breach Report provides the data-driven insight security leaders need to understand true exposure, make smarter investment decisions, and take concrete steps to improve resilience in the year ahead.

Get your copy of the report today, then schedule a personalized demo to see why enterprise security leaders consistently choose the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform to continuously validate, prioritize, and reduce their most critical exposures.