Picus Security’s Blue Report 2026 argues that many enterprise defenses still look stronger in testing than they are against quieter variants of the same attack behavior. According to a BleepingComputer piece authored by Picus Security researcher Sila Ozeren Hacioglu, the report is based on more than 338 million attack simulations run in real customer environments from January through June 2026. The top-line number improved. Picus says average prevention effectiveness rose from 62% to 69%, returning to what it describes as its 2024 peak. But the report’s core warning is that an aggregate prevention score can conceal major gaps between blocking a familiar procedure and stopping the underlying objective. The distinction Picus draws is between indicator-of-compromise testing and behavioral, tactics-techniques-and-procedures testing. In the report’s framing, indicator-based tests ask whether a control recognizes known malicious content, such as a malware download attempt. Behavioral tests ask whether a control can prevent the action itself, even when the attacker uses a less recognizable route. Picus says the edge layer is weakening even on the indicator-based tests it is built to handle. The report puts IOC-based malware download prevention at 50% across customer environments, down from 60% last year and 71% in 2024. That figure is single-source from Picus, but it is the report’s clearest quantitative warning about signature-style blocking. The sharper example involves credential dumping with Mimikatz. Picus says customer environments ran the same tool toward the same objective three ways: dumping credentials from LSASS process memory, pulling Remote Desktop Protocol credentials from other memory locations, and reading LSA Secrets from the local registry. The reported prevention rates were 94%, 17%, and 3%, respectively. Picus groups those three paths under MITRE ATT&CK OS Credential Dumping, T1003. The practical point is narrow but important: a control that blocks a well-known LSASS memory-dumping path may not stop adjacent credential-access behavior. In Picus’s telling, that means security teams should not treat a pass against a familiar tool path as evidence that the broader technique is covered. This should be read with source context. The only item in the cluster is a BleepingComputer article authored by a Picus employee and tied to Picus’s own report and product testing. The figures are useful as reported findings, but they are not independently corroborated by another outlet in the provided material. Who benefits: Security teams that already run control validation or purple-team exercises get a clearer case for testing technique variants, not just known tools. Vendors that support behavioral testing also benefit from the report’s framing. Who's exposed: Organizations relying on signature, indicator-of-compromise, or single-path tests as proof of coverage are most exposed. The provided material does not establish how widely the reported gaps apply beyond Picus customer environments.