As AI Floods Security Teams with Alerts, New Check Point Exposure Management Research Finds Critical Vulnerabilities Have Doubled, Yet Fewer Than 1 in 12 Demand Urgent Action

Under Pressure: The 2026 Exposure Gap Report reveals that as AI-driven attacks compress the window to respond, the defining security capability is no longer detection, it is knowing which exposures can actually be exploited

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP ), a pioneer and global leader in cyber security solutions, today released Under Pressure: The 2026 Exposure Gap Report, which finds that the proportion of critical vulnerability exposures more than doubled over the past year, even as fewer than one in twelve proved urgent enough to require immediate action.

Automation and AI-assisted attack tools are reshaping both the scale and pace of exposure.

Threat actors can now test exposed systems, credentials, phishing infrastructure, and known weaknesses across more organizations and at greater speed than manual triage can match.

The result is a widening exposure gap, the distance between visibility, prioritization, and safe remediation, and a shorter window for defenders to act before exposure becomes impact.

Key findings from the 2026 Exposure Gap Report:

Vulnerabilities surged: 42.6% of all critical exposures were vulnerabilities, more than double the 18.7% recorded a year earlier, making them the single largest category of critical exposure in 2026.

The prioritization gap: Only 7.8% of vulnerability alerts warranted Critical or High attention after exploitability validation, meaning more than 90% did not require the same immediate remediation focus.

Risk concentration: 76% of all critical exposures came from just two categories, vulnerabilities and internal information disclosure, concentrating risk around exploitable weaknesses and exposed information assets.

Phishing on the rise: Phishing websites grew to 10.5% of critical exposures, up sharply from 1.0% a year earlier, one of the fastest-growing exposure types of the year.

Action at scale: Organizations acted on 85.9% of recommended fixes across the industr...