New Cymulate Research Shows Security Experts View Threat Exposure Validation as “Absolutely Essential”

The 2025 Cymulate Threat Exposure Validation Impact Report reveals that exposure validation significantly decreases breaches and improves resilience against immediate threats

Cymulate, the leader in threat exposure validation, today released the Threat Exposure Validation Impact Report 2025, new research highlighting the technology’s growing importance in the modern threat landscape. The report surveys 1,000 security leaders, SecOps practitioners, and red and blue teamers from around the world to assess how they engage in security validation across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments. The findings indicate that exposure validation is evolving into a pillar of modern cybersecurity, with more organizations leveraging its capabilities to optimize defense and increase threat resilience.

The Threat Exposure Validation Impact Report 2025 found that 71% of those surveyed consider threat exposure validation to be “absolutely essential.” Organizations that run exposure processes at least once per month reported a 20% reduction in breaches, with improved mean time to detection and increased resilience against immediate threats. Respondents stated that automated security validation enabled them to test over 200x more threats than manual testing, and 97% of respondents who use automated security control validation and measure their cyber effectiveness reported a positive impact since implementation.

“This research confirms what we have always known: it’s not enough to have the right solutions in place. You must ensure they are performing as expected,” said Avihai Ben-Yossef, Co-founder and CTO, Cymulate. “Today’s organizations cannot afford to be reactive. The scale, speed and sophistication of new and emerging threats mean organizations need to evolve beyond legacy best practices like manual penetration testing. A proactive, offensive approach that leverages automation and AI to achieve continuous testing and monitoring is critical for those that want to achieve true cyber resilience with pressure-tested defenses.”

Key Findings:

• 98% of organizations plan to invest in exposure management in the future, with 89% planning to invest in the next 12 months
• 90% of security leaders apply validation to their exposure management process at least once a month
• 72% believe AI will play a significant role in exposure management
• 89% of security teams have already begun to implement AI into their exposure validation processes
• Almost two-thirds of security leaders say that missing exposures due to manual pen testing is an issue, while 67% say infrequent pen testing has left concerning gaps in security assessments
• 61% of security leaders agree their organization lacks the ability to identify and remediate exposures in their cloud environment
• 47% deprioritize exposure remediation due the effectiveness of compensating controls to prevent or detect an exploit
• 96% of organizations reported at least one security breach in the past year, while 84% of CISOs expressed concern over whether their cyber defenses could withstand an attack from a sophisticated threat actor

Cymulate, the leader in security and exposure validation, provides the single source of truth for threat exposure and the actions required to close security gaps before attackers can exploit them. More than 1,000 customers worldwide rely on the Cymulate platform to baseline their security posture and strengthen cyber resilience with continuous discovery, validation, prioritization, and guided remediation of security weaknesses. Cymulate automates advanced offensive security testing to validate controls, threats, and attack paths. As an open platform, Cymulate integrates with existing security and IT infrastructure and drives the workflows of the exposure management process.

Credit: Cymulate