MITRE Cybersecurity Evaluation Reveals Industry-Wide Protection Gaps, VectorCertain Claims 100% Block Rate

The MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Evaluations, considered the most rigorous cybersecurity testing program, revealed significant industry-wide protection gaps in its December 2025 Enterprise Round 7 results. Nine participating vendors achieved a maximum block rate of 31%, with CrowdStrike and Cybereason tying for the highest protection score, while 69% of adversarial actions executed without being stopped. The evaluation incorporated cloud adversary emulation, identity-centric attacks, and cross-environment lateral movement simultaneously for the first time, testing against real adversaries including Scattered Spider, responsible for the MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment breaches, and Mustang Panda, a PRC state-sponsored espionage group.

All nine vendors scored zero percent on identity attack blocking, despite Test 2 targeting identity providers using Scattered Spider's exact playbook from the MGM and Caesars attacks. Cloud attack blocking rates ranged from zero to 7.7% across the cohort, with five vendors blocking nothing in the first AWS adversary emulation in MITRE's history. Three major vendors—Microsoft, SentinelOne, and Palo Alto Networks—withdrew before the evaluation began, continuing a participation decline from 30 vendors in 2022 to 11 in 2025, a 63% reduction from peak participation.

VectorCertain LLC responded by conducting its own evaluation using MITRE's published ER7 adversary emulations as baseline, extending testing to include Volt Typhoon, a third adversary targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, plus behavioral governance testing via the H-Neuron Overcompliance Test Suite and memory governance testing via the Adaptive Memory Relevance Scoring framework. The company's internal results showed 100% protection rate across 14,208 tests against all three adversaries, with zero failures and governance decision latency under 100 milliseconds. These results are not MITRE-published, but VectorCertain has formally enrolled in Enterprise Round 8 for independent verification.

VectorCertain attributes the ER7 protection gap to architectural limitations of platforms built for post-execution detection rather than pre-execution prevention. SecureAgent employs a four-gate governance pipeline that evaluates every proposed AI agent action before execution, including HES1-SG for ensemble consensus, HCF2-SG for primary governance with four-layer independence cascade, TEQ-SG for execution-layer behavior evaluation, and MRM-CFS-SG for signal fusion and incident consolidation. This architecture addresses identity protection failures by governing actions at the point of intent rather than waiting for endpoint telemetry that identity abuse doesn't generate.

The macroeconomic implications are substantial, with global fraud and cybersecurity losses totaling $485.6 billion in 2023 according to Nasdaq Verafin's 2024 Global Financial Crime Report, and AI-specific cyberattacks costing an estimated $15 billion in 2024. TransUnion's H2 2025 Top Fraud Trends Report documented companies losing 7.7% of annual revenue to fraud on average, reaching 9.8% in the U.S. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report shows the global average incident costs $4.44 million, with U.S. organizations absorbing $10.22 million, while organizations deploying AI in prevention workflows saved an average of $2.22 million per breach. VectorCertain characterizes this as a 7% Global AI and Cybersecurity Tax on digital economies.