Exposed and unfixed: the 2026 state of vulnerability remediation

The number of vulnerabilities being discovered has never been higher. AI systems like Claude Mythos are surfacing exposures that would have gone undetected for months or years, and attackers are using the same technology to build exploits in minutes. Yet for most organizations, the process of fixing those vulnerabilities hasn't kept up. This report surveyed 300 IT and security leaders to understand how vulnerability remediation works in practice today: who owns it, what slows it down, and why known vulnerabilities keep appearing in breach post-mortems long after they were first identified. The findings reveal a significant and growing gap between detection maturity and remediation maturity, one that affects organizations across every industry and company size. If your security team is responsible for turning vulnerability findings into closed risks, this report gives you the benchmark data to understand where the industry stands and where the biggest opportunities to improve are.