Security teams have never had better visibility into their environments and never been worse at confirming what they fix stays fixed.
Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report puts the mean time to exploit at an estimated negative seven days. The Verizon 2025 DBIR puts median time to remediate edge device vulnerabilities at 32 days. These numbers have understandably driven the industry toward a clear response: prioritize better, patch faster. That advice is necessary. It is also incomplete. Because the question that still doesn't get enough attention is this: when you do patch, how do you know it worked?
Mythos Didn't Change the Problem. It Changed the Speed and Ease of Exploitation.
The discussions around the impact of AI have focused on speed: exploit development is getting cheaper, faster, and less dependent on elite human skill.
For remediation, this changes the stakes. Plenty of fixes get marked 'remediated' when what really happened was a vendor patch that turned out to be bypassable, or a workaround that depended on attackers behaving a certain way. Those used to be safe enough bets. They aren't anymore. The question is no longer the speed of remediation. The question is whether your remediation actually eliminated the exposure or simply moved the ticket to 'done.'
