GoKawiilBy Sila Ozeren Hacioglu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security.
A prevention score tells you what a control recognizes. It doesn’t tell you what that control stops.
Now in its fourth year, the Blue Report 2026 from Picus Labs measures how enterprise prevention and detection actually perform in production, across more than 338 million attack simulations run in real customer environments from January through June, 2026.
The headline is a genuine recovery, with a caveat: yes, prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69%, back to its 2024 peak.
But that number is a stack-wide average, and it masks a softer, more vulnerable interior.
The same controls that block a well-known attack tool let a quieter version of the same technique slip straight past your defenses. What decides the outcome isn’t the product in place, but how recognizable the attacker's method is, and whether anyone tested for the quiet variant.
IOC-based and TTP-based security testing each measure different things
Whether a defense holds depends on which of two questions you put to it.
IOC-based testing asks whether a control recognizes known bad. Malware samples circulating in the wild are delivered as download attempts, and perimeter controls such as firewalls, web proxies, and secure email gateways either block them or don’t.
For this layer this is the right instrument: stopping known-bad content at the edge is what those controls are for.
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