142 Engagements. 952 Findings. 0 Zero-Days.
When we analyze the most critical enterprise security breaches this year, a striking pattern emerges: malicious actors aren’t relying on sophisticated, million-dollar nation-state exploits. They don’t need to. Instead, they are systematically gaining full domain dominance by abusing forgotten passwords, misconfigured non-human accounts, and active credentials left exposed in everyday collaboration tools.
To provide security leaders with a realistic benchmark, Approach Cyber synthesized the raw, anonymized data from 142 security engagements delivered over the past year, resulting in 952 total findings.
The result is the Pentest Annual Report 2026. This document moves past theoretical security checkboxes to show you exactly how attackers are bypassing multi-factor authentication, hijacking CI/CD pipelines, and walking right through physical and digital perimeters. Approach Cyber can help you with the pragmatic steps your organization must take to stop them.
What you will discover
📊 Key Statistics:
- The Vulnerability Breakdown: We map out 952 total security findings by severity. Discover what percentage of discovered flaws pose an immediate, critical threat to business continuity.
- The Undisputed #1 Attack Vector: Learn which specific type of security flaw accounted for nearly 40% of all findings across all industries.
- The Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Gap: See the alarming success rate of attackers bypassing MFA through modern phishing and session theft techniques and what it means for your identity access management.
- The Speed to Total Compromise: Discover the median number of days it takes a Red Team to go from initial entry to gaining Domain Admin rights.
📈 2026 Security Trends:
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The SSO Trap: Why the widespread adoption of Single Sign-On platforms is inadvertently boosting the blast radius of a single compromised account.
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The New Perimeter: How unprotected runner secrets turn standard code adjustments into major supply-chain breaches.
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Credential Graveyards: The dangerous spots within collaboration tools where engineers routinely leave active tokens and connection strings.
💡 3 War Stories:
Go step-by-step behind the scenes of our red team operations to see exactly how these vulnerabilities play out in real life
- ‘Walking Right In, Twice’
- ‘The Ghost in the Machine Account’
- ‘Tokens in the Open’