State of Threat Management 2026

61% of organizations say they cannot determine which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited in real-world attacks.

German security teams report spending just 27% of their time on low-priority or non-exploitable risks.

94% say a proactive cybersecurity posture in 2026 will depend on integrating threat intelligence with exposure management.

Only 41% of organizations have a fully consolidated view of cyber risk exposure.

Organizations deploy an average of 14 different threat intelligence feeds.

52% of North American organizations report having a fully consolidated view of cyber risk exposure.

Concern about disrupting systems (49%), excessive manual effort (46%), and poor integration with existing security processes (42%) are the top barriers to validating whether threats are exploitable.

Currently, 37% of exposure management processes are AI-driven and organizations expect this to reach 59% within two years.

56% say AI and automation would most help in understanding which threats are relevant to their specific environment.

93% agree that delaying improvements to how they manage cyber risk increases the likelihood of serious incidents.

EMEA organizations report 37% having a fully consolidated view of exposure and 35% using continuous, automated validation.

APAC organizations report 31% having a fully consolidated view of exposure and 27% using continuous, automated validation.

84% of security decision-makers and practitioners agree that cyberattacks exploit known risks that are not prioritized.

Security teams spend 42% of their time investigating risks that later prove low priority or non-exploitable.

Germany leads surveyed countries with 58% adoption of automated validation.

88% of security teams acknowledge that periodic assessments cannot keep pace with the speed of change in their environments.

95% of organizations agree greater automation would improve their confidence that teams are focused on the most important risks.

Three-quarters of organizations plan to invest in both cyber risk quantification tools and exposure assessment capabilities over the next 12–24 months.

58% of U.S. organizations report a fully established CTEM program.

51% of North American organizations use threat intelligence within a continuous, automated validation process.

Only 38% of organizations use threat intelligence within a continuous, fully automated validation process.

Organizations outside North America are roughly 20 percentage points behind North America on both consolidated cyber risk visibility and continuous automated validation.

88% of security teams agree that without greater automation, they cannot keep up with the volume of risks they must assess.

59% say AI and automation would most help detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures.

89% say reducing alert noise would help identify which alerts represent real business risk.

Nearly 9 in 10 security decision-makers and practitioners agree that threat intelligence alone does not reduce risk unless it is continuously validated against actual exposure.

54% say AI and automation would most help in validating whether exposures are realistically exploitable.