Cybersecurity teams have spent years strengthening defenses, deploying new tools, and refining vulnerability management programs.
Yet breaches continue to occur with alarming frequency.
According to Dhiyva Poole, Gartner Sr Director Analyst, the reason may be surprisingly simple: organizations still do not see themselves the way attackers do.
Speaking at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit 2026, Poole challenged security leaders to rethink traditional approaches to cyber risk by adopting an attacker-centric view of their environments.
They’re not looking to break in where you’re strongest. They’re looking where you’re unaware.
The Attack Surface Is Bigger Than Most Organizations Realize
Poole cited Gartner research showing that organizations often underestimate their attack surface by as much as 30 percent.
The gaps are rarely found in critical systems already receiving significant attention from security teams. Instead, attackers are increasingly targeting forgotten infrastructure, unmanaged assets, legacy applications, exposed cloud services, and abandoned domains.
For attackers, these overlooked assets represent opportunity.
“They are not looking for one big weakness,” Poole explained. “They build attacks over time by connecting multiple exposures together.”
The challenge for organizations is that many of these exposures appear insignificant when viewed individually. However, when combined, they can create a clear path to critical systems and sensitive data.
From Vulnerability Management to Exposure Management
A central theme of the presentation was the growing importance of Exposure Management as a strategic cybersecurity discipline.
Traditional vulnerability management often focuses on severity scores such as CVSS. Exposure management, by contrast, prioritizes risks based on how attackers would actually exploit them.
Poole outlined three core pillars:
1. Visibility
Organizations must continuously discover and monitor both managed and unmanaged assets across internal and external environments.
2. Prioritization
Security teams must evaluate exposures in context, understanding how vulnerabilities, identities, configurations, and threat intelligence combine to create exploitable attack paths.
3. Validation
Organizations should continuously test assumptions through offensive security practices, validating whether attack paths are truly exploitable and whether existing controls can detect and stop them.
Together, these pillars create a more realistic understanding of enterprise risk.
Thinking Like an Attacker
Poole suggested that adversaries consistently evaluate organizations through three simple lenses:
- Discoverability – Can they see it?
- Attractiveness – Is it worth targeting?
- Exploitability – Can they use it?
These filters, she argued, offer a practical framework for security leaders looking to prioritize risk more effectively.
If it’s predictable, it’s defendable.
Rather than treating every vulnerability equally, organizations should focus on exposures that score highly across all three dimensions.
Continuous Validation Becomes a Business Imperative
Another major takeaway from the session was the need to move beyond point-in-time assessments.
Poole highlighted Gartner’s Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework and the growing market for Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) solutions, which help organizations continuously test and validate attack paths.
The goal is not simply to identify weaknesses but to understand which weaknesses actually matter.
For executives, this shift has direct business implications. Continuous validation can improve resource allocation, reduce remediation costs, and provide greater confidence that security investments are delivering measurable value.
The Wrap
As digital ecosystems continue to expand, security leaders face an increasingly complex challenge: understanding not only what assets they own, but how those assets appear to potential adversaries.
Poole’s message was clear: organizations that continue to rely solely on traditional vulnerability management risk overlooking the interconnected exposures that attackers exploit every day.
The future of cybersecurity will belong to organizations that continuously discover, prioritize, and validate their exposures through the same lens attackers use.
Or, as Poole summarized during her presentation, the best time to see your organization through an attacker’s eyes is before the attacker does.
