Most companies believe they are protected right up until they have been breached.
So why do the tools create a false sense of safety, and what closes the gap between tools and actual security, asks Mohammed Pochee, cybersecurity product manager at Vox.
There is a persistent vulnerability gap that sits between the implementation of security tools and the belief that a company is rigorously protected. Firewalls, antivirus, endpoint solutions and multi-factor authentication tools sit at the heart of most cybersecurity systems. They have been built to stop known threats, but modern attacks aren’t approaching the business in the same way, and as companies invest, security keeps falling behind.
According to Expert Insights, there is still a ‘persistent gap’ between investment in tech and the outcomes it provides, with 63% of those surveyed experiencing a breach in the past year.
The attackers aren’t breaking in; they’re logging in using stolen credentials. Acting like employees, they’re using logins that have been stolen or purchased off the dark web and moving through systems with relative ease. The security systems put in place to detect anomalous behaviour aren’t flagging this activity because they can’t see anything wrong. The median dwell time for cyber-espionage groups is now upwards of 122 days, says the Mandiant M-Trends 2026 report. It also found that 45% of vulnerabilities in the business are never addressed, but those that are addressed take 74 days to repair. Equally concerning is that the time from the moment of breach to the moment the ransomware is deployed has dropped from eight hours in 2022 to 22 seconds.
What’s making this even harder to manage and detect is the technology behind the attacks. Most cybercriminals are using AI to adapt, personalise and hide inside normal activity and older defences aren’t built to detect these threats. AI-powered attacks need to be met with AI-powered defences. Some intruders don’t even bother with installing malware anymore; they use the legitimate tools already on a device, like Windows PowerShell, so their activity looks like routine administration. They can slip past the detection tools easily because they’re only watching for something malicious.
This is a global problem. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 found that even as companies are reporting that they are more confident about their resilience, they keep absorbing serious operational and reputational damage from attacks. This distance between how secure a business feels versus how secure it is has become a risk in and of itself.
Unfortunately, this risk is felt more keenly by small to medium enterprises (SMEs) because, says the same WEF report, they are twice as likely to be under-resilient when compared with their enterprise counterparts. And sub-Saharan African companies have some of the lowest levels of resilience in the world. For SMEs, they have a slightly steeper hill to climb because they have tighter budgets, security is often sidelined in favour of other urgent projects or costs, and there remains the persistent belief that attackers primarily go after bigger targets. Instead, they are becoming the low-hanging fruit that makes hacker efforts easier.
Cost, however, is a paradox. Many SMEs don’t look at the cost of a fully-fledged security system because they assume it’s out of reach when the real cost is the breach itself. And there are security platforms and ecosystems that are priced to sit within their reach and protect critical data and infrastructure – priced at a point that is realistic for the SME. Every pot has its lid, and every SME has a security vendor that can meet its needs.
Closing the illusion of security begins with visibility. Don’t buy more products and wedge them into perceived gaps in the business; instead, dig into your network and existing systems to see what you have in place and how this can be enhanced. Move past the single tool layer and instead create layered protection that has multiple tools protecting one another so nothing within the network is trusted by default.
The gap is widening, wedged open by AI, and closing it comes down to zero trust – nothing inside or outside the network is trusted; everything is evaluated, everything is checked. And only then does the gap stop becoming a place where the attackers can hide.