Every year Verizon publishes the Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), a critical report for roles across the enterprise. Executives focus on the headline numbers, security teams assess their own exposure against Verizon’s data, and consultants use it to frame their next meeting. However, if you’re an IT professional who is responsible for patch deployment, this year’s most significant DBIR finding is about your core competence.
For the first time in almost two decades, vulnerability exploitation ranks as the most targeted initial access avenue for attackers to get into organizations’ networks. This is because attackers are not inventing new threats but working with the same vulnerabilities and exploiting them faster. Meanwhile, organizations are getting slower at patching. The report describes this state of vulnerability management as a treadmill picking up speed.
This means that your quarterly compliance review cycle and your monthly patching schedule are simply not enough to keep up with the pace of attackers in today’s threat landscape. Plus, the volume of what needs patching has grown while remediation rates have dropped. The report also flags AI-augmented vulnerability discovery as something likely to add even more to that backlog.
If all of this feels like too much to digest on your own, here is a summary of the 2026 DBIR with everything you need to know related to patching and the next steps you should take to stay ahead of the game.
Getting down to the numbers
The 2026 DBIR analyzed over 22,000 security breaches. Vulnerability exploitation accounted for 31% of them, with stolen credentials as the most common initial attack vector. Keeping systems patched is now essentially the front line of endpoint security. The reason behind this shift is tied to AI combined with an increasing lack of visibility over endpoints.
Attackers are choosing the faster lane
Threat actors are now using AI and automation to accelerate vulnerability research, weaponization, and deployment. While the types of vulnerabilities are not new, attackers are now moving quicker to exploit them.
Threat actors are now using AI across multiple stages of an attack. The report found that the median attacker used AI assistance across 15 distinct documented techniques, with some actors using it for up to 50 techniques.
For patch management, the report flags something else, too. Organizations should expect a larger volume of patches from coordinated disclosures driven by AI-augmented vulnerability discovery. The takeaway? The volume of patches needed isn’t shrinking anytime soon—in fact, it’s set to surge.
The other half of the problem
The vulnerabilities getting exploited are rarely unknown. They are discovered, cataloged, published, and sitting unpatched on systems that either dropped off the IT team’s radar or simply did not get patched in time.
Only 26% of critical vulnerabilities in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog were fully remediated in 2025, marking a fall from 38% the year before. The median time to full resolution went up to 43 days, and organizations had 50% more critical vulnerabilities to patch this year.
Unpatched systems stay unpatched because IT teams rarely have a complete and real-time picture of what needs patching across the whole fleet. This could be due to a machine that was reimaged but did not go back through the patching workflow, a server that dropped out of the management console after a network change, or a new branch office device that never made it into inventory.
What you can’t get from the report
The 2026 DBIR states what went wrong across more than 22,000 confirmed breaches in 145 countries. What it can’t tell IT teams? Specifics about their environment.
It doesn’t say exactly which patch was missed on the marketing team’s laptops last month or that a server in the finance team is running a version two releases behind because it was excluded from patching three cycles ago. The report provides the category of the problem but leaves the rest for IT teams to figure out for themselves. Yet correlating what the report describes at the industry level and what is actually sitting exposed in any IT environment is where most security programs get stuck.
Already have the tools? Gaps can still persist
Most teams already know what needs to be done and likely already have the necessary tools in place. However, patch coverage is harder to maintain than it looks, and the tools meant to manage it are rarely working in complete sync with each other.
In most environments, Windows patching still lives in one console and third-party app patching lives somewhere else. macOS is handled by an entirely different process, while servers follow a separate schedule and are owned by a different team. Each tool manages its own inventory, applies its own compliance logic, and produces its own reports—and none of them communicate with each other.
The result is that while the coverage looks complete on paper with each tool reporting on what it manages, there are still gaps between these tools—and these gaps are exactly what attackers take advantage of.
Taking a page out of the attackers’ book
If you are responsible for patching vulnerabilities or managing endpoints, the most useful lesson in this year’s report comes from the attackers themselves. They did not invent new mechanisms. They just took the ones that already worked and got better at using them.
The controls you already understand and have in place are the right ones. Findings from the 2026 DBIR confirm that the problem is not which tool you use but whether you can execute patching consistently across every device—and fragmented tooling makes that harder than it should be.
Implementing end-to-end exposure management
ManageEngine Endpoint Central handles vulnerability detection, prioritization, and patching in a single console across Windows, macOS, Linux endpoints, servers, and 1,100+ third-party applications. Vulnerabilities are prioritized using an AI/ML-based risk score that factors in exploitability, active attack trends, asset criticality, and real-time threat intelligence.
This approach ensures that you’re not entirely dependent on CVSS scores alone, which tend to flag too many items as critical without accounting for whether they are actually being exploited in the wild. When a patch is available, Endpoint Central correlates it to the identified vulnerabilities, and then you can deploy it from the same console to mitigate the vulnerability. When a patch is not yet available, you can deploy mitigation scripts and manual fixes to reduce exposure. And, for run-of-the-mill updates, you can automate the entire patching cycle from testing to deployment in a custom schedule that works for your organization.
Together, these capabilities address the specific gaps related to patching that the 2026 DBIR data points to:
- Lacking visibility across different OSs? Endpoint Central helps you detect and mitigate vulnerabilities across multiple platforms from the same console.
- Uncertain if KEVs remain unpatched? Endpoint Central tells you daily exactly what vulnerabilities are present on your endpoints, prioritizes them, and correlates the relevant patches you need to deploy. You also get details on how long specific vulnerabilities have existed in your network so you can get to patching them quicker.
- Too many vulnerabilities that are yet to be patched? Endpoint Central helps you automate the deployment of patches on a scheduled basis so you can rest easy knowing that your endpoints are up to date.
With Endpoint Central, organizations know what vulnerabilities exist in their environment and have a consistent, connected workflow to move from detection to remediation across every endpoint in the fleet.
You can’t patch what you can’t catch
Patching closes the known doors attackers are likely to use. However, to stay secure from the AI-powered vulnerabilities that feature in this year’s report, you’ll need advanced security measures like EDR. Endpoint Central’s EDR capability, available as an add-on, uses AI-powered behavioral analytics to detect threats that do not leave obvious signatures, specifically fileless malware and living-off-the-land techniques that blend into normal admin activity. When an anomaly or suspicious behavior is flagged, remediation happens from the same console through device isolation, process termination, ransomware rollback, or a patch applied directly.
What to do when attackers use increasingly advanced tools
The 2026 DBIR shows that attackers are using AI assistance across 15 documented techniques on average. Consider what could happen when attackers’ tools make a meaningful jump in their ability to discover vulnerabilities and move autonomously across an attack chain. Frontier AI models are already being evaluated in controlled settings for vulnerability research on both sides of the battle, and the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation can narrow from days to hours.
Another critical security layer is Secure Private Access (SPA). When attackers move faster through an environment, the damage they can do depends on how much they can reach. Traditional VPN access grants broad network connectivity after a single authentication event, which means a compromised credential could open up a wide attack surface.
The SPA add-on to Endpoint Central replaces the traditional VPN model with context-aware Zero Trust access, where every request to an internal application is evaluated against device trust verification, identity policies, and a real-time posture check at the time of the request. A device that fails the posture check does not get access, regardless of whether the credentials are valid. This limits lateral movement at the access layer, which is where AI-assisted attacks tend to do the most damage after an initial foothold is established. Like the EDR add-on, it runs natively within Endpoint Central from the same agent and the same console.
These advanced security measures do not depend on knowing what the attack or vulnerability looks like in advance, yet they still have the capacity to keep you protected from it.
Looking ahead
Here are a few more findings from the 2026 DBIR that are worth knowing if you take care of patching.
Ransomware grew to 48% of all breaches, up from 44% the year before. Simultaneously, 69% of ransomware victims refused to pay and the median ransom paid continued to decline. More organizations are hardening their response even as the volume of attacks grows, however SMBs still remain vulnerable. The human element was present in 62% of breaches, and mobile-centric social engineering attack simulations show click rates 40% higher than email.
Shadow AI finally has a number on it. Sixty-seven percent of users are accessing AI services on corporate devices through non-corporate accounts outside the visibility of IT teams. The most common data being submitted to these unauthorized platforms is source code, followed by images and structured data. Shadow AI is now the third most common non-malicious insider action in Verizon’s DLP dataset.
Besides shadow AI, most of these are not new threat categories, but they all trace back to the same underlying problem: threats arise from what the IT team cannot fully see or control.
Endpoint Central addresses the gaps revealed in the report that go beyond patching. Privilege management controls limit what any user, contractor, or vendor can access, reducing the blast radius if credentials are compromised. Mobile device management brings phones and tablets under the same visibility perimeter as laptops, ensuring corporate data in BYOD organizations remains protected from social engineering attacks. Data loss prevention capabilities in Endpoint Central flag when sensitive data is being moved to unauthorized destinations, including unsanctioned AI platforms.
Moreover, Endpoint Central is not made of separate tools bolted together. All of these capabilities run from the same agent and the same console as your patch management system, which means the coverage gaps that show up in the DBIR are the same ones Endpoint Central is built to close. Consolidating your work into a platform like Endpoint Central, paired with EDR for continuous detection and SPA for Zero Trust, means fewer seams for things to fall through and fewer places for attackers to exploit.
Try Endpoint Central now and close the gaps in your security posture before the DBIR 2027 has the chance to describe you, too.
Author: Abitha Devi R
About the author:
Abitha is a product specialist at ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation. In her current role, she helps organizations tackle the challenges in endpoint management and security.
(https://gravatar.com/abithadevir)