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CybersecurityHQ issues and preserves dated, bounded external cyber judgment.
Not news reaction. Not advisory opinion. Not consensus analysis.
Assumption Under Stress Remediation state persists as a durable security condition.
Constraint Logged Fully patched Fortinet firewalls accept unauthorized SSO logins through a new attack path the vendor is still working to address. A VMware vCenter vulnerability patched eighteen months ago enters active exploitation and CISA KEV status in January 2026. An eleven-year-old GNU InetUtils authentication bypass surfaces in coordinated exploitation campaigns the week of its disclosure. Destructive malware deploys against NATO-aligned critical infrastructure using previously undocumented tooling.
Across these cases, patch application did not terminate exploitability. Remediation timelines did not outlast adversary capability redevelopment. Compliance evidence captured at time of patch did not reflect operational exposure at time of attack.
Patched systems are treated as secure at the moment of remediation. Vulnerability closure is treated as permanent after vendor release. Compliance attestation is treated as current after point-in-time verification. Detection coverage is treated as sufficient after signature deployment.
The constraint is not patch availability. It is remediation state decay between verification and exploitation.
Unresolved Tension Whether compliance frameworks that treat remediation as a terminal security state remain defensible when patched infrastructure resumes attack surface status on adversary timelines.
AUDIENCE_SCOPE: CISO_ONLY
VERDICT_MODE: INSTITUTIONAL_FRAME
PRESSURE_CLASS: CONVERGENT
Coverage spans ongoing CISO intelligence and versioned decision artifacts.