Security teams have never had more telemetry. They have also never been more behind.
In 2025, organizations faced an average of 1,968 cyber attacks per week, an 18% YoY increase, and nearly a 70% increase since 2023. That’s not just “more noise.” It’s a signal that attacker throughput is scaling faster than human response models can.
At the same time, the attacker playbook shifted in ways that punish slow cycles. Social engineering moved beyond email into multi-channel, cross-platform operations, including new interaction-led techniques like ClickFix, which manipulates users into executing the attack themselves. ClickFix activity increased by roughly 500% and appeared in nearly half of documented malware campaigns.
And while humans remain a primary target, attackers are finding even easier traction in unpatched, unmanaged, and inherited exposures. These gaps give adversaries durable footholds long before exposure remediation is implemented. Couple that with automation, and exposures become the cheapest, fastest path to compromise at scale.
The reality is simple: you can’t “detect your way out” if you can’t continuously reduce, validate, and remediate your exposure surface.
That’s why Exposure Management is having its moment now: not as another dashboard, but as an operating model for turning intelligence into validated, safe action, before exploitation.
2025’s three trends all point to the same gap: action
Let’s connect the dots across three defining patterns from the report:
1) Social engineering became execution, not persuasion
ClickFix-style techniques blur a line security professionals historically relied on: “malware delivery” vs “user action.” Instead of sending an obvious payload, attackers guide users through a workflow that looks legitimate (CAPTCHA, verification steps, error fixes), pushing execution onto the victim.
This matters because it reduces the effectiveness of controls that are optimized for blocking attachments or known malware signatures. The most dangerous step becomes a “normal” user interaction.
The implication of this is that your risk isn’t just the presence of a lure, it’s the set of conditions that make it work (where it can reach users, what privileges those users have, what compensating controls exist, and whether you can disrupt the campaign before it touches production workflows.
2) Ransomware Ecosystem Volatility Reshaped Attacker Strategy
2025 saw unprecedented volatility across the ransomware ecosystem: major RaaS groups disappeared, rebranded, or were disrupted, only for new or revived actors to fill the vacuum. Groups like Qilin surged by aggressively recruiting displaced affiliates, eventually becoming the most active ransomware operator of the year with over 1,000 published victims.
Simultaneously, exploitation of zero‑day and n‑day vulnerabilities drove mass-compromise campaigns. Cl0p’s exploitation of widely used enterprise file‑transfer and ERP software produced some of the year’s highest victim counts. LockBit’s re-emergence as LockBit 5.0 reaffirmed that even when law enforcement dismantles infrastructure, seasoned operators can rapidly rebuild and reclaim market share.
Cyber strategies must adapt to an ecosystem where attacker turnover is high, tooling is shared, and exploitation cycles accelerate. Attackers rely on:
- interchangeable tooling
- affiliate migration
- shared infrastructure
- rebranding cycles
This means that any delay in applying security actions (patching, compensating controls, segmentation, identity hardening) creates a persistent opportunity window, regardless of which ransomware brand is on top this month.
3) Time-to-exploitation keeps shrinking; backlog becomes breach
The Exposure Management report frames the modern problem as an “action gap”: with AI aiding acceleration, attackers move from discovery to exploitation in hours, while organizations often need days or weeks to coordinate analysis, ownership, validation, and remediation.
The data points are telling: organizations identify thousands of exposures, yet only ~50% are remediated annually, and the mean time to remediation averages 3.5 days. Meanwhile, environments generate massive volumes of signals, hundreds of millions of new threat intelligence items, billions of assets inspected daily, making it even harder to separate “urgent and real” from “theoretical and stale.”
The implication of this is that prioritization alone is insufficient. You need an operational system that reduces exposure dwell time, the window where known weaknesses remain open, reachable, and exploitable.
Why “prioritize harder” fails (and what replaces it)
Security programs spent the last decade getting good at discovery:
- scan more
- detect more
- score everything
That worked, until it didn’t. The Exposure Management report summarizes the outcome: visibility improved, but control didn’t. You end up with
- long lists that don’t translate into risk reduction
- false positives and stale findings
- issues that are “severe” but not exploitable in your environment
Exposure Management, in its most practical form, is a continuous flow that connects:
- External & Internal signals (threat intel + attacker behavior +internal telemetry from attacks actually happening),
- Internal context (what’s actually exposed in your environment), and
- Safe remediation (validated, reversible actions that reduce exposure without causing downtime).
This is the pivot from “What should we fix?” to:
“How do we mitigate this safely, right now, with the controls we already have?”
And that includes rapid takedowns of malicious pages, patches, compensating controls, IoC dissemination, leaked credential fixes and more.
What “safe-by-design remediation” really means
One reason exposure backlogs persist is rational: fixes can break things.
The Exposure Management report calls out the operational reality: patching and configuration changes can introduce outages or performance degradation, and validating safety can take more coordination than detecting the issue.
As a result, teams hesitate, batch, defer, or avoid action, expanding the exploitation window even when risk is understood.
Safe remediation isn’t a slogan. It’s a set of mechanics:
- Validate fixes before enforcement (prove the change won’t disrupt critical services).
- Prefer compensating controls when patching is risky (reduce reachability/exploitability without waiting for a perfect maintenance window).
- Automate response where confidence exists (repeatable action, not manual ticket tennis).
- Make actions reversible (reduce fear, increase velocity).
The core metric to optimize shifts from “how many findings” to exposure dwell time and remediation velocity, measures that reflect real risk reduction.
Exposure Management as a response to the 2026 reality
If 2025 was the year attackers blended channels and accelerated execution, 2026 will reward cybersecurity professionals who operationalize action.
The security report’s forward-looking sections emphasize that:
- Attack surfaces are expanding through hyperconnected ecosystems and third parties, where a weak supplier can create widespread compromise paths.
- Trust is entering a new era as deepfakes and conversational fraud erode traditional verification assumptions.
- Resilience is becoming measurable and demonstrable, not a yearly compliance event.
Exposure Management fits this world because it’s built to:
- Unify external and internal signals,
- Cover third party suppliers and their weaknesses,
- Prioritize based on exploitability and context (not score alone), and
- Drive validated reduction continuously rather than episodically, across asset exposures, supply chain exposures and brand exposures.
Closing thought.....
Attackers aren’t waiting for your next quarterly review. They’re operationalizing in hours, across channels, across identity, across unmonitored infrastructure.
In that environment, the winning security programs won’t be the ones with the most dashboards, or the most tools. They’ll be the ones that can reduce exposure safely and continuously, shrinking the window where known weaknesses remain exploitable.
That’s the real promise of Exposure Management: not more intelligence, less exposure.
For a practical, step‑by‑step approach, the State of Exposure Management 2026 report outlines a concrete 30-60-90-day plan for turning intelligence into validated action.
Read the full State of Exposure Management report here.
Yochai Corem — VP Exposure Management at Check Point https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjexPeW4H3OqEJ35ESDzqA6aTWUaHUeNrj5LzHacekPBt9O9K2VVehzDker3WRXqItljaE3MbuYDtTF85-8utyrmr5Nly58b7RAL7nxOAVvXYaIdTIemM_OAZ_lJnwb60Tk3ulMI77iMNClJgph0UVglDJ_g_WDWrz3g2UNyjcB1ru-MXsxX4zekstEFv0/s1600/Yochai.png
