New research by Nagomi Security has revealed an alarming disconnect between how secure organisations think they are, compared to where real exposure exists. This overconfidence, as explored in Nagomi’s The Illusion of Maturity: 2026 Enterprise Exposure Snapshot, means that organisations are facing overlapping exposure within their networks, potentially putting them at significant risk. Notably, incomplete multi-factor authentication (MFA), missing or misconfigured endpoint detection and response (EDR) and weakened endpoint policies appear in more than 75% of organisations, often affecting the same systems at the same time.
The report also shows that exposure is evenly spread across environments. In most organisations, risk concentrates in a small number of high-impact conditions that persist over time. Amongst the surveyed enterprises, most organisations showed 20–40 total exposure findings that collapse into roughly seven high-signal conditions after correlation.
Worryingly, the research also found that misconfigurations scale faster than vulnerabilities. A single misconfiguration or degraded control can affect thousands of assets, creating more exposure than dozens of individual vulnerabilities. These conditions often sit outside traditional vulnerability metrics, so dashboards may look healthier even as attack paths remain open.
Emanuel Salmona, co-founder and CEO of Nagomi Security, said: “Exposure is being created faster than most organisations can realistically fix it. Teams see the issues, but remediation slows down as work moves across tools, owners, and priorities. That operational latency leaves risk sitting in the environment far longer than it should. Real resilience comes from tightening operations and collapsing the time between seeing exposure and actually eliminating it.”
Similarly, the report found that vulnerability management outperforms every other control area, with 91% of assets passing vulnerability assessments, while identity and endpoint controls pass at roughly 50%, and security awareness and training falls below 30%. However, more than 60% of organisations fail advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) policy tests, even when agents are deployed across the environment.
This is particularly concerning as single exposure conditions routinely impact thousands of assets, including scenarios where one exploited remote code execution vulnerability combined with weakened endpoint protections affects approximately 2,000 assets per organisation on average.
Yet, the research does suggest that 30% of assets demonstrate strong control coverage across identity, endpoint, and security awareness at the same time, which is a step in the right direction, despite leaving the majority exposed to convergent failure paths. This means that more work needs to be done – and fast.
The findings highlight a structural challenge for security teams: progress is often measured at the control level, while real risk accumulates where controls fail together. The report calls for a shift away from siloed metrics toward identifying and eliminating the high-impact exposure conditions attackers consistently exploit.
