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Overconfident and Underprepared: How Cyber Resilience Is Failing the Real-World Test
Human history loves a confidence crash. From Icarus to the Titanic, belief often beats reality. Immersive’s 2025 Cyber Workforce Benchmark Report suggests cybersecurity is heading the same way, and the iceberg is already in view. “Organizations aren’t failing to practice; they’re failing to practice the right things,” said James Hadley, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Immersive.
A Global Confidence Bubble in Cyber Resilience
Immersive’s new Cyber Workforce Benchmark Report tracks a widening gap between belief and performance.
Ninety-four percent of organizations say they can handle a major cyber incident. Real-world simulations show average decision accuracy at just 22 percent. Containment of test attacks takes an average of 29 hours.
Resilience Scores, the report’s core measure of cyber resilience, remain flat or slightly lower year over year. The average decline reaches 3 percent, despite rising budgets and board attention.
In the foreword, Oliver Newbury warns that the industry has “mistaken preparation for proof.” Immersive positions cyber resilience as evidence-based readiness rather than a feeling. The company defines it as the ability to prove, improve, and report capability under pressure.
Activity Masquerades as Readiness
The report draws on 1.8 million exercises, crisis simulations, and a survey of 500 cybersecurity leaders in the United States and United Kingdom.
The data shows teams stay busy but not necessarily effective.
The median response time to complete cyber readiness labs remains stuck at 17 days. Over 60 percent of industries show worse response times than the previous year.
Organizations still trust easy metrics. The most used indicators of readiness remain awareness training completion and exercise participation. Completion rates average about 81 percent, yet accuracy and speed stay weak.
Boards see green dashboards, not hard evidence. Immersive calls this reliance on counts and checkboxes “false metrics” that inflate confidence.
Practicing Yesterday’s Threats While Tomorrow Arrives
The report highlights four barriers that keep cyber resilience stuck in neutral.
- First, organizations keep “practicing the past.” About 60 percent of training focuses on vulnerabilities more than two years old. Teams overprepare for yesterday’s attack patterns while new techniques mature.
- Second, most exercises never move beyond fundamentals. Thirty-six percent of labs remain at a basic level, limiting advancement into intermediate and advanced readiness. The result is stalled maturity.
- Third, drills often exclude the wider business. Only 41 percent of organizations include non-technical roles in simulations, even though 90 percent believe cross-functional coordination is strong.
- The report’s authors bluntly state the problem. Organizations fail less from “lack of knowledge” and more from “lack of practiced coordination.”
- Fourth, training often misaligns with real threat behavior. Many programs optimize for audit frameworks instead of attack paths. MITRE ATT&CK trails third in prioritization, despite its direct mapping to adversary tactics.
Immersive warns that you can be fully compliant and still “train in the dark” if exercises ignore real-world attack chains.
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Experience Helps Until It Suddenly Hurts
The report explores how experience affects cyber resilience.
Veteran practitioners achieve around 80% accuracy in classic incident-response labs. They outperform less experienced peers on familiar threats.
Yet the pattern reverses for AI-enabled or novel attacks. Senior staff participation in AI scenarios drops 14 percent year over year. Meanwhile, participation by non-technical managers climbs 41 percent. The report quotes a stark line: “Experience teaches what to do next, until the next thing has never happened before.”
Organizations express high concern about AI misuse, deepfakes, AI-assisted phishing, and data leakage. Concern levels often sit above 70 percent. Actual practice, however, lags behind that anxiety.
Why This Matters for Cyber Insurance
For cyber insurers, the message is blunt. Self-reported readiness does not match crisis performance. Carriers that rely on questionnaires and basic control checks risk underwriting to a confidence mirage.
Flat Resilience Scores and slow containment times suggest hidden tail risk. A client can show training records and still fail to contain a ransomware event for more than a day.
The report’s emphasis on decision accuracy, completion, and time metrics aligns with growing insurer demand for performance evidence. Underwriters increasingly want proof of practiced incident response, not only written plans.
Immersive’s resilience model supports that shift. It emphasizes measurable outcomes like mean time to detect and mean time to contain, tested through live exercises.
For buyers, this approach may become a requirement for favorable terms. For carriers, it offers a path to more defensible pricing and capacity decisions.
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From Cyber Hubris to Cyber Resilience
The recommendations section pushes a hard reset on how organizations should build cyber resilience.
Immersive urges continual readiness training, not annual fire drills. The report recommends regular micro-drills and quarterly simulations, rotated across threat types.
It stresses completion, not mere participation. Partial engagement correlates with low accuracy and long containment times in benchmarking exercises.
The authors also call for direct board involvement. Executives should feel the pressure of simulated decisions, not only review slide decks.
Crucially, the report wants readiness expanded beyond IT and security. Legal, communications, HR, and leadership must rehearse their roles in a breach.
Immersive frames true cyber resilience as a repeating cycle: “Prove, Improve, Report.” Organizations test real capability, close gaps with targeted training, and share performance evidence with decision-makers.
The conclusion lands a clear warning. Confidence in cyber readiness has never been higher, but “real proof of that readiness remains elusive.”
For a sector built on risk transfer, that gap marks a growing fault line. Cyber insurance will feel the shock when hubris meets the incident report.
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