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Overview
As I look back at 2025, one thing that’s clear is that folks are starting to come around to the idea that continuous exposure management isn’t just a new buzzword – it’s a necessary shift in how teams think about proactive security practices.
Take one step onto the show floor of any cybersecurity conference and the first words you’re likely to see (apart from Agentic AI, weaponized AI, AI anomaly detection, and so on, of course) are Exposure Management. It seems that every vendor is claiming to be at the forefront of this evolution, even when offerings center around vulnerability scanners and call-backs to painful patching cycles.
This evolution is certainly happening, and I hear from countless organizations that they’re starting to consider how they can become more proactive, and get off the hamster wheel that is the backlog of exposure findings. More and more, teams are focusing on how a myriad of exposure types relate to one another and compound risk when attack paths form. While I’m heartened by this critical step forward, the industry still suffers from the same central challenge that proactive security is far too often theoretical, failing to take into account the specifics of an organization’s own environment and security controls.
The same vendors talking about driving the industry forward are often falling back into the same trap; black-box risk scoring and guesswork based on what they see “in the wild” instead of what’s happening in their own backyards. They are driving priorities based on severity scores of what could possibly happen, rather than what is actually possible in your environment.
The Problem with “What If”
As we enter 2026, speculation is no longer a sufficient metric for prioritizing risk, and I believe teams will start to truly embrace this fact. The legacy approach to vulnerability management was built on the assumption that a “Critical” severity score meant an immediate danger. But severity scores are inherently generic.
They tell you how bad a vulnerability is in a vacuum, or how often it’s being exploited on the internet – but what if those exploit victims look nothing like you? They don’t tell you if that vulnerability is exploitable on your specific server, sitting behind your specific firewall, protected by your specific EDR configuration.
We rely on speculation, and prioritize fixes based on generic severity, as teams drown in noise. Security teams burn out, trying to patch thousands of “Critical” issues that, in reality, have no path to exploitation because of existing compensating controls. Meanwhile, a “Medium” severity misconfiguration we’ve de-prioritized is acting as a wide-open door for an attacker to pivot laterally.
Validation: The Missing Piece of Context
In 2026, the mandate for Exposure Management must shift from identifying theoretical flaws to validating actual risk.
True validation is the process of moving from “this vulnerability exists” to “this vulnerability can be exploited here and now.” It requires an XM Cyber approach that ingests the full context of your environment. It asks the hard questions that a standard scanner ignores:
- Reachability: Is there an actual route from an adversary to this asset?
- Identity: If this asset is compromised, what privileges does the attacker gain?
- Controls: Does my current security stack (EDR, XDR, Firewalls) block the techniques required to exploit this?
If your security controls would stop the attack, that “Critical” vulnerability isn’t a fire drill, it’s a housekeeping item. That is the power of validation.
Focusing on the Exploitable
In 2026, I’m certain the organizations that win won’t be the ones that close the most tickets or address the most CVEs in the backlog. They’ll be the ones that prioritize the exposures that attackers can actually weaponize.
By validating findings against the reality of your environment, you can map legitimate attack paths to specific chains of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and identity exposures that an attacker could actually traverse to reach your crown jewels.
This approach creates a massive efficiency dividend. Instead of staring at a spreadsheet of 10,000 CVEs, validation allows you to identify the handful of Choke Points where applying a fix or a configuration change breaks multiple attack paths simultaneously.
Moving Beyond the Guessing Game
We have spent the last decade guessing. We guessed which vulnerabilities mattered based on CVSS scores. We guessed which assets were most at risk based on generic asset tags.
2026 is the year to stop guessing. It’s the year we demand our tools to understand our environment as well as we do. It’s the year where we stop reacting to theoretical severity and start acting on validated reality.
Let the algorithms speculate. It’s time for security teams to validate.
