Penetration Testing Statistics 2026: Breach Cost, Exploitation and UAE Data

This is a reference page. Every figure below comes from a named, publicly available source, with the publisher and year stated next to it. None of it is our own data. Where a report’s numbers sat behind a download gate and we could not read them directly, we left them out rather than repeat a figure from a summary. Where a figure is regional rather than UAE-specific, we say so.

Figures last verified: 6 September 2026.

Breach cost statistics

IBM’s annual study with the Ponemon Institute remains the reference series for breach cost, and 2026 is a record year.

• USD 4.99 million global average cost of a data breach, described by IBM as “a 12% increase over last year and a record high, driven by higher detection, escalation and lost business costs”, per the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 (IBM and Ponemon Institute, 2026).
• USD 6 million global average breach cost of an AI model inversion attack, which IBM attributes to the growing difficulty of protecting training data and sensitive information (IBM, 2026). It is the highest single breach-type figure IBM publishes on that page.
• USD 1.93 million in cost savings for organisations making extensive use of AI and automation in security operations, compared with organisations using none (IBM, 2026).
• 56% increase in AI-driven attacks, led by AI deepfake impersonations and AI-enabled malware (IBM, 2026).

A note on what is not here. IBM’s public landing page does not publish the regional breakdown, the mean time to identify and contain, or the Middle East figure that earlier editions carried. Those numbers sit inside the gated report, so they are not on this page.

Vulnerability and exploitation data

The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report records an inversion that matters directly to how you scope testing: the front door is now the software, not the password.

• 31% of breaches now start with software vulnerabilities, which Verizon states is “beating stolen passwords as the top way attackers get in”, per the 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report (Verizon, 2026).
• 48% of all breaches now involve ransomware, with Verizon noting that “payouts are shrinking” (Verizon, 2026).
• Verizon reports that “15% different attack techniques are now being bolstered by generative AI” (Verizon, 2026, quoted verbatim).
• 40% higher click rates on mobile devices, which Verizon describes as making them “the new favorite target” (Verizon, 2026).
• 1,695 vulnerabilities listed in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (CISA, count read 6 September 2026). This is the confirmed-exploited subset, and it is the list your remediation SLAs should be keyed to before anything else.

Pentest finding severity and remediation speed

The largest public pentest corpus is Cobalt’s, drawing on over 16,500 penetration tests conducted on nearly 3,000 organisations over a five-year period, alongside a 2026 survey of 450 validated information security professionals. Its most useful contribution is not how many findings exist but how fast they get closed.

• 10-day half-life for high-risk findings among top-performing organisations, against 249 days for bottom-tier organisations, per the State of Pentesting Report 2026 (Cobalt, 2026).
• 8 months of additional risk exposure faced by underperformers as a result of that gap (Cobalt, 2026).
• 45% of critical findings resolved within three days by programmatic teams, against 10% for compliance-driven teams, a 4.5x difference (Cobalt, 2026).
• 32% of AI and LLM findings rated High Risk, with high-risk findings appearing in AI and LLM tests at 2.7x the baseline rate (Cobalt, 2026).
• 38% resolution rate for AI vulnerabilities (Cobalt, 2026).

Sector benchmarks from the same corpus, which are the closest thing to a fair comparison for your own numbers:

• 9% of findings are high-risk and 86% of those get resolved in the software industry, with a 38-day mean time to remediate and a 38-day high-risk half-life - the fastest of ten sectors analysed, per State of Pentesting in the Software Industry (Cobalt, published 30 July 2026).
• 9% of findings are high-risk and 86% get resolved in financial services and insurance, with a 46-day mean time to remediate and a 55-day high-risk half-life, per State of Pentesting in Financial Services and Insurance (Cobalt, published 18 August 2026, sector sample n=65).
• 11% of software companies and 9% of financial services and insurance organisations have had an AI or LLM security incident, the latter being the lowest of any sector (Cobalt, 2026).

Pentest frequency and testing cadence

There is no reliable public statistic for “how often the average company runs a pentest”, and we are not going to invent one. What the data does support is a cadence comparison.

• 64% of software companies run a programmatic pentesting cadence, against 53% across all industries (Cobalt, 2026).
• 83% of software companies run regular AI security assessments and pentests, the highest of any sector (Cobalt, 2026).
• 48% of financial services and insurance organisations test their AI applications programmatically, the highest of any sector, against a 39% average across industries (Cobalt, 2026).
• 17% of financial services and insurance organisations plan to increase red team operations, the lowest of any sector (Cobalt, 2026).
• ~5,000 penetration tests per year is the annual volume underlying those sector figures (Cobalt, 2026), which is the sample you should weigh the percentages against.

On the compliance side, the frequency is set by the framework rather than by a survey. UAE-regulated entities are typically driven by NESA / UAE Information Assurance Standards, CBUAE requirements for licensed financial institutions, DFSA and FSRA rules in the financial free zones, ADHICS in Abu Dhabi healthcare, and DESC ISR in Dubai government supply chains. Each expects an independent, scoped engagement with documented methodology, severity assessment and retest evidence. None of them are satisfied by a scanner report, which is why the remediation half-life numbers above matter more than the finding count.

Middle East and UAE cybersecurity statistics

Genuinely UAE-only public figures are rare. Most credible regional data is published at Middle East or META (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) level. We have labelled the scope of every figure below rather than presenting a regional number as a UAE one.

• 75.8 million attacks from various online resources stopped by Kaspersky detection systems in the Middle East during the first half of 2026, per Kaspersky’s H1 2026 Middle East threat review (Kaspersky, published 29 July 2026).
• 82% of SMBs in the META region encountered cybersecurity incidents over the past year, against a global figure where only 14% of businesses with 100 to 499 employees avoided a cyber incident, per Kaspersky SMB research (Kaspersky, published 31 August 2026, 1,800 interviews across 18 countries).
• Top SMB incident types in META: phishing and software vulnerability exploits at 19% each, weak or stolen credentials at 18%, and external remote access at 16% (Kaspersky, 2026).
• Globally, organisations experienced an average of three different types of security incident annually (Kaspersky, 2026).
• Spyware attacks up 11% and password stealer attacks up 12% across the Middle East year on year, with mobile spyware targeting up 65% across META, per Kaspersky cyberespionage research (Kaspersky, published 3 August 2026).
• For Middle East businesses specifically: spyware detections up 20%, password stealer attacks up 30%, backdoor detections up 10% (Kaspersky, 2026).
• More than 20 APT groups actively tracked targeting organisations across META in 2026 (Kaspersky, 2026).

The UAE Cyber Security Council publishes awareness statistics through its Cyber Pulse initiative. These are global figures published by a UAE authority rather than UAE-measured figures, and we are labelling them that way deliberately.

• Nearly 97% of cyberattacks target passwords, per the UAE Cyber Security Council (UAE Cyber Security Council, published 22 April 2026; global figure).
• 32% increase in cyberattacks targeting digital identities during the first half of the year (UAE Cyber Security Council, 2026).
• More than 99% of attacks on digital identities can be prevented through multi-factor authentication (UAE Cyber Security Council, 2026).
• Around 40% of social media users worldwide have either been compromised or have unintentionally shared personal data (UAE Cyber Security Council, 2026; global figure).

What we could not verify

Being explicit about the gaps is part of the point of a page like this.

There is no publicly readable UAE-specific average breach cost. IBM’s regional breakdown, which historically included a Middle East figure, is not on the public report page for the 2026 edition. Any article quoting a precise UAE breach cost without naming a readable source is repeating a number rather than citing one.

There is no reliable public statistic on how frequently organisations run penetration tests as a general population. Vendor surveys sample their own customers, which biases the answer upward. The cadence figures above are explicitly Cobalt’s respondent base, not the market.

And the total incident and breach counts underpinning the Verizon DBIR sit inside the report PDF rather than on the public landing page, so the headline percentages above are quoted without the denominator. Treat them as directional shares, not precise counts.

How to cite this page

pentest.ae, “Penetration Testing Statistics 2026: Breach Cost, Exploitation and UAE Data”, published 6 September 2026, https://pentest.ae/blog/penetration-testing-statistics-2026/. Figures compiled from the primary sources listed below and last verified 6 September 2026. Where you are citing an individual statistic, please cite the original publisher named alongside it rather than this page.

Methodology and sources

Every statistic on this page was read directly from the source listed below on 6 September 2026. Figures available only in search snippets, secondary summaries, or gated downloads were excluded. No figure is ours, estimated, or extrapolated. Regional scope is stated inline wherever a number is not global.

If a source has since published a newer edition, or a figure here has been superseded, tell us and we will update the page and move the verification date.