The structural problem is straightforward. Organizations faced a median of 16 CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities in 2025, up from 11 the year before. Only 26% were fully remediated, down from 38%. Defenders are caught in Alice’s Red Queen Race.
AI is compressing the timeline further. The DBIR’s collaboration with Anthropic examined 793 threat actors who misused AI platforms for malicious purposes between March 2025 and February 2026. The median actor sought assistance across 15 distinct ATT&CK techniques. Thirty-two percent of AI-assisted initial access activity targeted vulnerability exploitation specifically. The report notes that creating exploit tools, adapting them across languages and discovering new vulnerabilities “is within reach with current AI coding assistance.” Anthropic’s own threat research documented the first known AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign, in which attackers used agentic AI to execute intrusions autonomously. By December 2025, researchers documented VoidLink, a complete malware framework built by an AI agent in six days. Twenty-nine percent of KEV vulnerabilities were attacked before public disclosure that year.
This acceleration demands a shift in how organizations exercise their incident response capabilities. NIST SP 800-84 has long recommended formal test, training and exercise programs for evaluating incident response preparedness. The growing speed and volume of exploitation makes that guidance urgent. Technical tabletop exercises, where participants work through actual triage rather than discuss hypothetical responses, should become routine. Teams need to practice identifying affected systems, determining blast radius, executing containment playbooks and coordinating remediation across departments under realistic time pressure. The window between initial compromise and full-blown breach is shrinking. How fast your technical teams can triage and contain directly determines the severity of the outcome. Organizations that encounter these decisions for the first time during a live incident will not move fast enough.
