Cyberbit Readiness Report 2026 Finds SOC Teams Lose More Than an Hour Between Detecting an Attack and Responding to It

ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyberbit today released the Cyberbit Readiness Report 2026, the first baseline of cybersecurity readiness built on how SOC teams perform under simulated attack, rather than on the training completed. The report draws on more than 1,600 team Live-Fire Exercises and Readiness Cycles run between January 2025 and June 2026 on the Cyberbit Original and RangeForce platforms, now combined as the Cyberbit Readiness Platform following Cyberbit's 2025 acquisition of RangeForce.

Most organizations track hours logged, courses completed, and certificates earned. None of these measures answer the question that decides an incident: can the team detect, disrupt, and defend against the adversaries targeting the organization? The Cyberbit Readiness Report 2026 measures that question directly, through demonstrated performance in Live-Fire Exercises scored on the Defense Readiness Index (DRI), a one-to-five scale of the adversary class a team can defend against.

Key findings

• Readiness is built, not hired. Across 19 organizations from the RangeForce platform and 199 analysts, no individual's presence was linked to a large difference in team performance. Data from the Cyberbit Original platform points in the same direction.
• Teams that keep exercising get measurably better. Organizations take on harder adversary scenarios as programs mature, and detection at each level holds as they climb.
• Exercise volume is not proof of readiness. Repeated attempts at a top-tier scenario do not, by themselves, demonstrate progress.
• Organizations detect faster as they mature. At matched difficulty, 13 of 18 SOC teams detected faster in later Readiness Cycles, with detection rates held or improved.
• More than an hour is lost between detection and response. Median detection takes 62 minutes; the move from detection to first response takes a further 71 minutes.
• Readiness varies far more than any average shows. Median detection runs from 23 to 169 minutes across organizations and exercise types. An average hides the difference between a team that is ready and a team that only looks ready.

The report also sets an early AI baseline with demand signaling that new AI-focused labs and Live-Fire Exercises on the platform drew about 3.2 times as many attempts in their first 180 days as comparable non-AI content.

"Before Cyberbit, I spent years running security operations centers, and I saw the same pattern again and again: teams that looked ready on paper struggled the first time a real attack arrived, and we had no data to explain why," said David Etue, CEO of Cyberbit. "This report gives security leaders that data. Readiness lives in how a team works together under pressure, not in a single standout analyst or a stack of certificates. The 71 minutes teams lose between seeing an attack and acting on it is where incidents are won or lost, and it is a gap every organization is able to measure, coach, and close."

The report translates its findings into a roadmap for CISOs and SOC leaders.

For CISOs, the levers are structural:

• Fund readiness as a program
• Set the required readiness level against the adversaries that target the organization
• Track whether teams detect faster at matched difficulty cycle over cycle

For SOC leaders, the levers are operational:

• Exercise as a team on a steady cadence
• Aim practice at the tactics in the current threat picture
• Climb difficulty deliberately
• Rotate analysts through exercises around a stable core, so capability spreads across the team

"This report provides valuable insights for security leaders," said Alex Whitworth, Cybersecurity Solutions Vertical Executive at Carahsoft Technology Corp. "The Cyberbit Readiness Report 2026 gives Public Sector agencies something compliance alone cannot: a measurable baseline for how their teams perform under attack, and a clear path to improving it."

Download the full report at cyberbit.com/readiness-report

About Cyberbit

Cyberbit builds defensive team readiness aligned to each organization's risk and resources. The platform hones teamwork, processes, and technical abilities in cycles of exercises and skills labs, which mature alongside defenders. With AI customization and the largest catalog of skills experiences mapped to frameworks and certifications, Cyberbit builds capabilities from small SOCs to elite government threat hunting teams. Learn more at cyberbit.com

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