2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation

Validate Exploitability. Don’t Just Manage Vulnerabilities.

Security teams juggle 60+ tools, yet most still can’t answer one critical question: Can attackers actually exploit the exposures you see?

Traditional vulnerability management identifies possible weaknesses—but doesn’t confirm if they’re truly exploitable. Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) closes that gap by emulating real-world attacks in your environment to provide hard evidence of risk.

Gartner states that “through 2027, 40% of organizations will have adopted formal exposure validation initiatives, most relying on AEV technologies and managed service providers for maturity and consistency.”

Gartner, Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation, Eric Ahlm, Dhivya Poole, Angela Zhao, Mitchell Schneider, 11 March 2025

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