Why It's Time to Shift to Preemptive Exposure Management

"For anyone not paying attention, the number of vulnerabilities facing security teams today isn't just growing - it's exploding. The 2025 Verizon DBIR found that vulnerability exploitation was present in 20% of all breaches, a 34% increase over 2024. The biggest targets were edge devices and VPNs, which saw an eightfold jump year-over-year. These trends are alarming and if your team is still relying on patching alone to mitigate vulnerabilities, your organization is dangerously exposed."

"With a preemptive security approach, preparation is replaced with prevention and being ready when attacks come. In this preemptive world, teams can mitigate attacks before they begin, but it's not by using manual analysis or burdening security teams with additional tools. Quite the opposite. Preemptive security leverages automation, AI, and behavioral analytics to continuously map the new, expanded attack surface, and then assesses risks in real time, and shuts them down before they can be exploited."

"This is especially important today with cybercriminals embracing these same innovations to bypass increasingly outdated controls. Typical innovations in use today include: AI-driven malware capable of mutating on the fly. Phishing campaigns that can be tailored on a huge scale to bypass even trained human judgment. Ransomware operators can go from initial access to full encryption in minutes. In each of these scenarios, the preparative approach of yesteryear cannot keep pace."

Vulnerability exploitation surged significantly in 2025, with exploitation present in 20% of breaches and major increases targeting edge devices and VPNs. Patching alone proved insufficient, with only about 54% of vulnerabilities fully remediated and a median remediation time of 32 days. Preemptive security shifts from periodic preparation to continuous prevention by using automation, AI, and behavioral analytics to map expanding attack surfaces, assess risks in real time, and shut down threats before exploitation. Cybercriminals leverage AI-driven mutating malware, large-scale tailored phishing, and rapid ransomware escalation, making automated, real-time exposure management essential.

Read at Securitymagazine