Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

A simple guide for understanding how ASM actually supports your security program. We often hear organizations ask.

In 2026, the ASM scorecard has moved well past discovery. The market is shifting from visibility to validated proof: what’s exploitable, what connects to critical systems, and what requires immediate action. The latest GigaOm Radar for Attack Surface Management is anchored to that bar. Across 32 vendors, it highlights the platforms that have moved beyond inventory into contextual prioritization and actionable validation. This is the turning point CyCognito is built for.

CVE-2026-20127 is a critical authentication bypass vulnerability affecting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller (vSmart) and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (vManage). The flaw stems from improper validation within the control plane and management plane authentication mechanisms, allowing a remote, unauthenticated attacker to submit crafted requests that bypass standard authentication controls. Successful exploitation results in access to the system as a high-privileged internal user account.

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are templates for launching and scaling Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Because Amazon EC2 AMIs are reused across environments and automation pipelines, decisions about how you build, source, manage, and share them directly affect your cloud attack surface.

CVE-2026-22769 is a hardcoded credential vulnerability affecting Dell RecoverPoint for VMs, a disaster recovery orchestration platform used to manage replication and failover of virtualized workloads. The issue stems from static authentication credentials embedded within a product component. Because these credentials are not uniquely generated per deployment and cannot be changed by administrators, they introduce a structural authentication weakness.

Security frameworks have always had a gap. They tell you to find vulnerabilities and fix them, but they’ve rarely provided a system to determine which ones actually matter before you tap into your most expensive resource: engineering time. CTEM changes the game by treating security as a continuous lifecycle rather than a series of silos.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating digital transformation at an unprecedented pace. New AI-driven applications, copilots, data pipelines, APIs, and cloud services are spinning up faster than ever before. But while innovation moves at machine speed, governance often lags behind. The result? A rapidly expanding external attack surface filled with forgotten assets, abandoned cloud resources, and misconfigured DNS records — many of them quietly waiting to be hijacked.

CVE-2026-1731 is a vulnerability disclosed in products developed by BeyondTrust. At the time of writing, publicly available technical details regarding the root cause, vulnerable code paths, and exploitation prerequisites remain limited. Based on initial advisory information, the issue affects components involved in privileged access or remote access workflows, which are typically deployed to manage high-value credentials, session brokering, or secure administrative access to enterprise systems.

For years, security programs reported progress using the same familiar metrics: number of vulnerabilities, patch rates, backlog size. These metrics became the default scorecard not because they reflected risk, but because they were easy to produce. The problem is that these metrics do not measure security improvement. They measure activity. Vulnerability counts rise and fall with scan cadence. Patch rates spike around maintenance windows. Backlogs grow when coverage improves.