SAFEBREACH
State of the Breach Report
See data-driven insights about which 2025 threats actually put enterprises at risk—and where security leaders must focus in 2026 to reduce material impact.
The Take on 2026
Get an in-depth analysis of millions of real-world attack simulations that reveals:
- Where enterprise security programs perform well
- Where modern threats evade defenses
- How trends differ across industries and architectures
- What steps you can take to improve resilience in 2026
Key Report Insights
Industry Test Focus Doesn’t Always Reflect Highest Risk
Validation volume varies sharply by industry. Most sectors heavily test ransomware and perimeter-focused controls, while under-validating stealth, identity abuse, cloud, and post-compromise behaviors.
Focusing on Likelihood & Impact = Higher Resilience
Industries that align validation to both likelihood (what attackers use) and blast radius (what enables material impact) consistently achieve higher resilience than those optimizing for familiarity alone.
Network Inspection & DLP Controls Lead the Charge
Network Inspection and DLP controls blocked the most threats, with blockage rates of approximately 65% and 70% respectively, while endpoint controls underperformed with a blockage rate of approximately 53%.
Stealth- & Identity-Driven Campaigns Evade Defenses
Attacks like ransomware were consistently prevented, but stealthy, identity-driven campaigns (like Russian GRU) evaded defenses. Gaps cluster around credential abuse and post-compromise movement.
Lateral Movement & Credential Exposure Persist
Segmentation blocked over half of lateral attempts. Over 60% of organizations exposed harvestable credentials (Windows Registry, plain-text), enabling rapid privilege escalation.
AI Exploits Weaknesses Across Industry Lines
AI-generated malware was relatively well contained, but infostealers showed the lowest blockage rates. Industries with fragmented/endpoint-heavy architectures performed the worst.
Centralized Architecture Is Key to Improved Outcomes
The strongest resilience was seen in industries with integrated security stacks. Industries with fragmented IT/OT faced greater challenges regardless of budget or tool count.
Continuous Validation Drives Resilience
Organizations that validated, remediated, and re-validated saw rapid, measurable improvement across all threat categories. Resilience is an operational practice, not a maturity milestone.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have a question about the SafeBreach State of the Breach Report? We’re here to help.
The State of the Breach report is an authoritative source of enterprise security-control-validation data. This annual report provides an in-depth analysis designed to help security leaders understand where enterprise security controls are performing well, where modern threats evade defenses, how trends differ across industries and architectures, and what steps can be taken to strengthen resilience.
As the category leader in Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV), SafeBreach empowers organizations to use attack simulations to continuously and safely validate how their security controls perform against the latest adversarial behaviors, malware families, and CISA-issued alerts.
The State of the Breach Report for 2026 analyzes the results of 1.8 million real-world attack simulations executed by large, global enterprises—including some of the world’s largest financial, healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure institutions—using the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform over a 12-month period.
Every simulation outcome in the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform falls into one of three key performance categories—prevented, detected, or missed—which provide a clear, outcome-driven view of security effectiveness. The State of the Breach report uses these prevention, detection, and miss rates as objective reference points to evaluate controls, architectures, industries, and threat categories.
Yes. The State of the Breach Report provides tangible recommendations security leaders can use to enhance their cyber resilience in the coming year, regardless of company size, industry, or security architecture. To learn how the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform can help you benchmark your own readiness and resilience gaps, talk to one of our offensive security experts today.
