Security teams have never lacked vulnerability data. The harder problem is deciding which issues create a credible path to business impact, then acting before that path can be used. As frontier AI makes it faster and less expensive to connect weaknesses, operational assumptions, and legitimate system behavior, that decision window is becoming even tighter.
The Gartner® report, Mythos Reprioritizes Cybersecurity Outcomes and Investments, examines what this shift means for cybersecurity priorities and investment. Rapid7 is offering complimentary access to the research, which we believe can help security leaders reassess how they prioritize exposure and infrastructure teams reassess how they plan response and recovery.
Why does AI change the vulnerability management equation?
Gartner states, “Mythos collapses the distance between theoretical weaknesses and executable attack scenarios, forcing cybersecurity to optimize for outcomes, not activity.” For leaders already managing more vulnerabilities than their teams can address, the pressure comes from the growing speed at which separate weaknesses can become a credible attack path.
The change also extends beyond one model. Gartner states, “By 2027, Mythos will be overtaken by new frontier-AI-enabled models, signaling that this moment is not about Mythos, but a new era of AI-assisted vulnerabilities and functional exploits.”
At Rapid7, we believe this requires a more attacker-aware view of exposure. A large backlog can contain thousands of issues with very different implications for the organization. Leaders need to understand which exposures are reachable, how they could be combined, which business services they affect, and what action would reduce risk most effectively.
What should security leaders measure instead?
Vulnerability counts, backlog size, and generic remediation targets show how much work a team has completed. They provide less clarity on whether an attacker’s options have narrowed or whether the organization can respond and recover more effectively.
Gartner advises, “Organizations must shift focus from volume and activity to speed of decision, effectiveness of response, and tangible reduction of enterprise risk in an environment where attacker reasoning scales rapidly.”
The report examines outcome-driven measures including “Attack path analysis coverage,” “Patching cadence,” “Compensating control deployment cadence,” “Mean time to remediate,” and “Technology debt.” We believe this gives leaders a stronger basis for connecting security investment with reduced exposure, faster action, and business resilience.
How can teams move from prioritization to action?
Better prioritization only creates value when teams can act on it. Gartner recommends, “Use attack path analysis to prioritize your patches, virtual patches, and compensating controls. This can scale down to a consideration of critical services mapped into critical business outcomes and exposure.”
Rapid7’s internal, practitioner-led exploration of Claude Mythos Preview through Project Glasswing reinforces our view that faster discovery is only the beginning. A model may help identify and validate a potential vulnerability, but reducing exposure still requires teams to understand affected systems, apply business context, choose the right remediation or compensating control, verify the result, and maintain detection coverage.
Rapid7’s vulnerability management capabilities support this operational path by bringing attack-surface visibility, threat intelligence, business context, and attack-path analysis together, helping teams identify which exposures matter most and coordinate remediation through existing workflows.
What does an outcome-led program look like?
An outcome-led program gives executives a clearer answer to a more useful question: which attacker opportunities did we reduce, and how quickly could we respond? It also supports ongoing decisions about technical debt, recovery planning, and where limited resources can deliver the greatest reduction in business risk.
Access the complimentary Gartner report, Mythos Reprioritizes Cybersecurity Outcomes and Investments, to explore how AI-assisted vulnerability discovery may change cybersecurity priorities, metrics, and investment decisions.
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Gartner, Mythos Reprioritizes Cybersecurity Outcomes and Investments, Paul Proctor, John Watts, Emily Tan, 28 May 2026.
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Gartner Report: The Attack Path is Closing Faster than Most Teams Can Patch