SafeBreach, a leader in enterprise exposure validation, has published its inaugural State of the Breach Report, which analyzes over 1.8 million real-world attack simulations conducted by global enterprises to assess the effectiveness of security controls against critical threats.
The report aims to provide Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) with empirical data to answer the question of whether their organizations are adequately protected against the most impactful attacks. Throughout 2025, SafeBreach customers utilized the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform to execute simulations drawn from CISA alerts, nation-state tradecraft, emerging ransomware and infostealers, and industry-specific tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This extensive data set forms the basis for the 2026 State of the Breach Report.
Key findings indicate that behaviors such as identity abuse, lateral movement, and AI-driven infostealing consistently evade enterprise defenses. These trends directly influence the prioritization of efforts in detection engineering, identity controls, and overall exposure management. The report also highlights how factors like industry sector and security architecture impact an organization’s resilience, enabling leaders to benchmark their posture against peers.
According to Guy Bejerano, CEO of SafeBreach, “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. The findings within the SafeBreach 2026 State of the Breach Report are designed to do the same, replacing assumptions with empirical evidence about where enterprise controls perform well, where they fail, and how trends differ across industries and architectures. It’s a must-read for CISOs and security leaders looking for data-driven insights that can help them improve resilience in the year ahead.”
The report reveals several specific insights: enterprises demonstrated consistent prevention of “loud,” payload-centric ransomware attacks, yet “stealthy,” identity-driven campaigns, such as Russian GRU tradecraft, showed a 28% miss rate. Network Inspection and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls were most effective, blocking approximately 65% and 70% of threats, respectively, while endpoint controls had a lower blockage rate of approximately 53%. Furthermore, more than 60% of organizations were found to have exposed harvestable credentials, including those stored in the Windows Registry and plain-text passwords, which could enable rapid privilege escalation for attackers.
Organizations with integrated, centralized security stacks generally exhibited stronger resilience. In contrast, fragmented IT/OT and endpoint-heavy environments struggled, irrespective of their budget or the number of security tools deployed. The report also found that organizations that regularly validated, remediated, and re-validated their security controls achieved rapid, measurable improvements across various threat categories, underscoring that resilience is an ongoing operational practice.
The full 2026 State of the Breach Report, available for download, offers additional insights into enterprise security control performance and expert recommendations for enhancing resilience in the coming year. SafeBreach, based in Sunnyvale, California, specializes in enterprise-grade exposure validation through its platform, which combines breach and attack simulation with attack path validation to identify and address security gaps.
