The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report analyzed more than 22,000 confirmed data breaches across 145 countries. Its findings point to a single uncomfortable truth: organizations cannot patch fast enough to prevent every incident. Exploitation of vulnerabilities surged to become the leading initial access vector, the median time to remediate a critical flaw climbed to 43 days, and the volume of critical vulnerabilities grew 50% year over year. Even top-performing organizations only managed to fix 30% to 40% of known exploited vulnerabilities listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog within the first week of detection. That rate barely budged despite years of invest...