According to the recently published Blue Report 2026, based on the analysis of more than 338 million attack simulations conducted in production environments between January and June 2026, security controls successfully blocked 69% of attack attempts at the prevention stage.

However, once an attacker gained access to the environment, defenses stopped only 37% of post-compromise actions.

This finding highlights a growing concern for security leaders: organizations have become increasingly effective at detecting and blocking noisy, easily identifiable attacker behaviors, while quieter activities often remain undetected.

Threat actors can still perform reconnaissance, identify valuable assets, gather credentials, and move laterally through networks before triggering security alerts.

The report also identifies significant challenges in detection effectiveness. While organizations logged 58% of simulated attacks, only 14% generated actionable alerts, indicating a substantial gap between data collection and operational detection capabilities.

Performance-related issues accounted for nearly half of all detection-rule problems identified during the study.

Several attack techniques stood out as particularly difficult to prevent: evasion tactics achieved some of the lowest prevention rates in the report, reinforcing the need for stronger behavioral analytics and continuous security validation.

At the same time, encouraging improvements were observed in endpoint protection and privilege escalation defenses, suggesting that the industry is making progress in key areas associated with an assume-breach security strategy.

For security teams, the report reinforces a crucial message: cybersecurity effectiveness can no longer be measured solely by perimeter defenses.

Organizations must continuously validate their ability to detect, prevent, and contain attacker activity across the entire attack lifecycle.

Picus recommends regularly testing security controls, validating detection rules, verifying log-source health, and simulating modern ransomware and threat actor techniques in realistic environments. Additionally, vulnerability remediation efforts should be prioritized based on demonstrated exploitability rather than severity scores alone.

As threat actors increasingly leverage automation and AI-driven techniques, continuous security validation is becoming an essential component of cyber resilience.

Feel free to contact us (sales@idc.it) for an obligation-free chat to demonstrate how Picus can help can improve the security in your organization.