The report highlights several concerning findings:
- 84% of security professionals say successful cyberattacks exploit known but unprioritized risks.
- Security teams spend 42% of their time investigating alerts that ultimately prove to be low priority or not exploitable.
- Only 41% of organizations have a consolidated view of their cyber risk exposure.
- Nearly 9 out of 10 respondents believe threat intelligence has little value unless it is continuously validated against real-world exposure.
- 89% believe reducing alert noise would significantly improve their ability to identify genuine business risks.
- 61% cannot confidently determine which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited in real-world attacks.
These statistics illustrate a common operational problem: security teams are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of vulnerabilities, alerts, and intelligence feeds. Every alert competes for analyst attention, making prioritization increasingly difficult.
Why File-Based Threats Make Prioritization Even Harder
One important contributor to this overload is the enormous number of potentially malicious files entering organizations every day through email, collaboration platforms, cloud storage, web downloads, USB devices, and third-party data exchanges.
Every suspicious Office document, PDF, archive, or image may require:
- malware scanning,
- sandbox detonation,
- behavioral analysis,
- threat intelligence correlation,
- analyst investigation,
- prioritization,
- and often manual response.
Most of these files ultimately prove harmless, yet every one consumes security resources before a decision can be made.
This is exactly the operational bottleneck described in Filigran’s research: security teams spend valuable time determining whether something deserves attention, rather than reducing exposure itself.
Where FileDNA™ CADR Changes the Equation
Rather than helping analysts prioritize more alerts, FileDNA Content Analysis, Disarm and Reconstruction (CADR) reduces the number of risky events entering the security pipeline in the first place.
Instead of asking: “Which suspicious document should we investigate first?”
FileDNA asks: “Why allow active content to enter the organization at all?”
Every incoming file undergoes deep structural inspection to identify active content such as:
- embedded macros,
- JavaScript,
- OLE objects,
- shell links,
- embedded executables,
- scripts,
- malformed structures,
- suspicious metadata,
- hidden objects,
- external references,
- and other executable components.
Potentially dangerous content is removed while preserving the document’s intended business information. The file is then reconstructed into a clean, safe version before reaching users or downstream security systems.
Reducing the Prioritization Burden
This upstream approach directly addresses several challenges identified in the Filigran report. Instead of generating another detection event that must be validated, FileDNA prevents many document-borne attack techniques from progressing beyond the delivery stage.
The result is:
- fewer malicious files requiring sandbox analysis,
- fewer alerts reaching SIEM, SOAR, XDR, and SOC platforms,
- less analyst time spent triaging document-related threats,
- reduced alert fatigue,
- lower operational overhead,
- and more time available to investigate genuinely sophisticated attacks.
In effect, FileDNA decreases the number of security decisions organizations must make every day.
CADR Complements CTEM Rather Than Competes With It
Continuous Threat Exposure Management focuses on determining which existing weaknesses attackers are most likely to exploit.
FileDNA CADR operates one stage earlier in the attack lifecycle by preventing one of the most common exploitation mechanisms—the weaponized file—from reaching endpoints. Together they create complementary layers:
| CTEM / Exposure Management | FileDNA CADR |
|---|---|
| Prioritizes vulnerabilities | Eliminates malicious file content before delivery |
| Determines exploitability | Removes executable content from files |
| Improves analyst focus | Reduces analyst workload |
| Continuously validates exposure | Continuously sanitizes incoming documents |
| Helps decide what matters most | Prevents many threats from becoming incidents |
From Prioritization to Prevention
The Filigran research demonstrates that organizations are no longer suffering from a lack of visibility—they are struggling with operational overload. Every additional alert competes for limited analyst attention, increasing the likelihood that truly dangerous threats remain unaddressed.
FileDNA Content Analysis, Disarm and Reconstruction (CADR) offers a complementary strategy. By neutralizing weaponized documents before they enter enterprise workflows, it removes a significant portion of file-based attack opportunities from the security equation. Instead of forcing security teams to continually prioritize an ever-growing stream of suspicious documents, CADR reduces the volume of threats requiring investigation altogether, allowing CTEM, SOC, SIEM, and XDR platforms to focus on higher-value risks that genuinely require human analysis.
This combination shifts organizations from reactive prioritization toward proactive exposure reduction, decreasing alert fatigue while strengthening the overall cybersecurity posture.
References:
- Filigran — State of Threat Management Report (2026)
- CrowdStrike — Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)
- Bitsight — Vulnerability Prioritization
- Orca Security — Context-Aware Vulnerability Prioritization
- SAFE Security — The Evolution of Vulnerability Prioritization
- Cloud Security Alliance — The Power of CTEM
- TechRadar — From Noise to Action
- TechRadar — Why CTEM Is the Answer to Boardroom Pressure and Security Fatigue
- TechRadar — The Security Alerts You Ignore Are the Ones That Matter