A Structured Research Platform for Cybersecurity Professionals and Analysts
The CyberSanso Research Hub is built for the people who need more than a general overview. Security analysts tracking active threats, IT teams evaluating vendors, compliance officers researching frameworks, and researchers investigating attack techniques all use the same information but need it organised differently.
This hub brings together cyber threat intelligence research, CVE vulnerability data, security framework analysis, attack technique breakdowns, cybersecurity vendor comparisons, and current statistics into one structured platform. Every section is sourced, categorised, and regularly reviewed so you spend less time searching and more time acting on what you find.
Nine Research Areas Inside the CyberSanso Research Hub
Use the sections below to go directly to the research area most relevant to your current work. Each section is built around a specific research discipline within cybersecurity.
AI & LLM Security Research
Tracking prompt injection, model poisoning, adversarial ML, and security risks specific to generative AI systems.
SaaS Risk & Shadow IT Research
Research on SaaS sprawl, shadow IT, OAuth token abuse, and breaches that start with a third-party SaaS app.
Original Research & Reports
CyberSanso's own studies and data, not just a summary of someone else's breach report.
Cyber Insights Library
Explore trending cybersecurity, AI, and SaaS insights covering security tools, threat research, cloud security, SOC platforms, and emerging technology trends.
AI & Cybersecurity Policy Tracker
Rolling coverage of the EU AI Act, US state privacy laws, and emerging sector-specific cyber regulation.
Cyber & AI Market Intelligence
Funding, M&A, and consolidation trends across the security and AI tooling markets.
AI Model Benchmark Lab
Independent testing of leading AI models on accuracy, safety, and hallucination rate.
Breach & Incident Timeline
A dated, named log of major disclosed breaches: company, sector, vector, scale.
Security & AI Glossary
Analysis, case studies, and commentary on emerging threats, research findings, and industry developments.
Every research section inside the hub is free to use without a subscription. The data, framework breakdowns, and vendor information are reviewed and updated on a regular basis. The hub is not a sales tool. It exists because good security decisions require good research.
Cyber Threat Intelligence Research: From Raw Data to Actionable Findings
Cyber threat intelligence is the process of collecting, processing, analysing, and communicating information about threats to help organisations make better security decisions. Good threat intelligence research separates signal from noise. Not every indicator of compromise (IoC) is relevant to every organisation, and treating all threat data as equally urgent is a common and costly mistake.
Threat intelligence research is categorised into three levels. Strategic intelligence covers high-level trends, threat actor motivations, and geopolitical factors relevant to an organisation’s risk profile. Operational intelligence covers specific campaigns, attack timing, and targeting patterns. Tactical intelligence covers the technical details of attacks including malware signatures, command and control infrastructure, and specific exploits being used in the wild.
Open source threat intelligence (OSINT) forms a significant part of practical research. Public sources including government advisories from CISA and NCSC, vendor threat reports from Mandiant and CrowdStrike, academic research publications, and security community resources like VirusTotal and Shodan all contribute usable intelligence without requiring paid subscriptions.
The MITRE ATT&CK framework is the most widely used structure for organising threat intelligence. It maps adversary behaviour to specific tactics (the why) and techniques (the how), making it easier to correlate threat reports across different sources and identify gaps in detection coverage. Threat hunting sits at the intersection of threat intelligence and active investigation: rather than waiting for alerts, threat hunters use intelligence to form hypotheses about attacker behaviour and search through logs, endpoints, and network data to find evidence.
Vulnerability Research and CVE Tracking
Vulnerability research is the discipline of finding, documenting, and understanding security weaknesses in software, hardware, and systems before attackers can exploit them. The CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) system, maintained by MITRE and funded by CISA, provides the standardised identifiers used to reference known vulnerabilities across the industry.
Each CVE entry includes a unique identifier, a description of the vulnerability, the affected products, the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score indicating severity, and references to patches, advisories, and proof-of-concept exploits. Tracking CVE entries relevant to your technology stack is a core operational task for any security team.
Zero-day vulnerabilities are flaws that are unknown to the vendor and therefore have no patch available at the time of exploitation. Zero-day research is a highly specialised field. Some zero-days are discovered by security researchers and disclosed responsibly to vendors through coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) programs. Others are sold or weaponised before the vendor is aware they exist.
- National Vulnerability Database (NVD) for enriched CVE data and CVSS scores
- Exploit Database (Exploit-DB) for public proof-of-concept exploit research
The relationship between vulnerability research and threat intelligence is direct. Threat intelligence tells you which CVEs are being actively exploited in the wild, turning a theoretical risk into an immediate operational priority. CVSS scores provide one input to patch prioritisation, but context matters: a critical vulnerability in software you do not run is less urgent than a medium-severity vulnerability in a system exposed to the internet. The combination of vulnerability data and active threat intelligence is what drives effective risk-based patch management.
Security Framework Research: MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, OWASP, ISO 27001 and CIS Controls
Security frameworks provide structured approaches to managing cybersecurity risk. Understanding how these frameworks work, where they overlap, and which applies to your context is a core research task for security professionals, compliance teams, and anyone building or evaluating a security programme.
MITRE ATT&CK: The most comprehensive publicly available knowledge base of adversary behaviour, documenting over 400 techniques across 14 tactics. Used for threat modelling, detection gap analysis, red team planning, and mapping security controls to known attack patterns.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF): A risk management structure built around six core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover, and Govern (added in CSF 2.0, released 2024). Vendor-neutral, applicable across industries, and used as the baseline by many US government agencies and large enterprises.
OWASP Top 10: The most referenced resource in application security, documenting the ten most critical web application security risks. Updated periodically to reflect current attack patterns. OWASP also produces the Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) and the Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM).
ISO 27001: The international standard for information security management systems (ISMS). Provides a framework for establishing, implementing, and continually improving information security governance. ISO 27001 certification requires a formal audit and is increasingly required by enterprise customers as a condition of doing business.
CIS Controls: A prioritised set of 18 control groups covering the most effective actions for reducing cyber risk. Prescriptive rather than descriptive, making them a practical starting point for organisations building security programmes from scratch.
Cyber Attack Research: Techniques, Tactics, and Statistics
Systematic attack research gives defenders a structured understanding of how breaches actually happen. The research areas below cover the attack vectors that appear most frequently in current threat data, with statistics drawn from published industry reports.
The Core of Every Cybersecurity Strategy
Attack research is most useful when it is specific, sourced, and mapped to defence. Each category below links to documented techniques, real incident data, and the MITRE ATT&CK mappings that connect observed attacker behaviour to defensive controls.
Ransomware Research
Ransomware attacks targeted an average of 4,506 organisations per week globally in 2024 according to Check Point Research. Double extortion (exfiltrate data, then encrypt) is now the dominant model. Healthcare, education, and government remain the most targeted sectors by incident frequency.
Phishing Research
Phishing accounts for over 80 percent of reported security incidents. Spear phishing targeting specific individuals achieves significantly higher success rates than mass campaigns. AI-generated phishing content has narrowed the quality gap between targeted and mass attacks, with voice phishing (vishing) using cloned audio now a documented enterprise threat vector.
Supply Chain Attack Research
Supply chain attacks target software vendors, managed service providers, and open source packages to compromise downstream customers at scale. The SolarWinds compromise (2020) and the XZ Utils backdoor (2024) represent the scale of risk. Dependency confusion and typosquatting in package registries are documented active attack patterns.
Social Engineering Research
Social engineering exploits human psychology rather than technical vulnerabilities. Business email compromise (BEC), vishing, smishing, and deepfake-assisted impersonation are the fastest-growing vectors in current enterprise attack research. The FBI reported BEC losses exceeded 2.9 billion dollars in 2023 alone.
Nation-State Threat Research
Nation-state threat actors operate with long-term persistence objectives, advanced tooling, and significant resources. APT groups are tracked by security vendors using naming conventions including APT28 (Russia), Lazarus Group (North Korea), and Volt Typhoon (China). Critical infrastructure, defence, and technology sectors receive the highest targeting frequency.
Malware Analysis Research
Malware analysis covers static analysis (examining code without executing it), dynamic analysis (running samples in a controlled sandbox), and behavioural analysis (observing runtime behaviour). Primary research tools include Any.run, Cuckoo Sandbox, Ghidra, and VirusTotal. Malware families are tracked by vendors using naming conventions that often differ across research teams.
These six areas work together. A firewall without endpoint protection still leaves devices exposed. Monitoring without a response plan just tells you something went wrong after the fact. We build all six into a single, coordinated cybersecurity service provider relationship instead of selling them as disconnected add-ons.
Cybersecurity Research Methodologies and OSINT Techniques
How you research matters as much as what you research. Security research methodology covers the systematic approaches used to gather, verify, organise, and act on security information without introducing bias, missing critical data, or drawing incorrect conclusions.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): The collection and analysis of information from publicly available sources. In cybersecurity research, OSINT covers DNS enumeration, WHOIS lookups, Google dorking (advanced search operators to surface exposed data), certificate transparency logs, Shodan and Censys for internet-facing infrastructure research, social media intelligence, and dark web monitoring.
The Intelligence Cycle: The structural process for research. Direction (define what you need to know), Collection (gather raw data), Processing (clean and organise data), Analysis (interpret what the data means), Dissemination (communicate findings to those who need them), and Feedback (refine the process based on outcomes).
Red Team Research: Adopting an adversarial perspective to test defences from the outside in. Research findings from red team exercises, when documented systematically, produce operational intelligence about real detection gaps. Purple team exercises combine red team attack simulation with blue team detection work to directly measure and improve response capability.
Structured Analytic Techniques (SATs): Methods borrowed from intelligence community practice, including Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH), which requires analysts to evaluate all hypotheses against the same evidence. SATs reduce the cognitive bias that is one of the most significant sources of error in threat intelligence analysis.
Cybersecurity Vendor Research and Security Tool Evaluation
Choosing security tools and vendors is one of the most consequential decisions an organisation makes, and also one of the most difficult to research objectively. Marketing materials describe capabilities. Procurement processes evaluate cost and integration. Neither reliably predicts operational effectiveness in your specific environment.
A structured vendor research approach covers four areas. Feature and capability analysis covers what the tool actually does and how it differs from alternatives in the same category. Integration requirements cover whether it works with your existing stack including SIEM, EDR, SOAR, and identity providers. Deployment model covers cloud-native, on-premise, or hybrid options. Support and incident response commitments cover what happens when the tool fails during an actual incident.
The primary vendor categories in cybersecurity include SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), EDR and XDR (Endpoint Detection and Response, Extended Detection and Response), CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker), IAM and PAM (Identity and Access Management, Privileged Access Management), WAF (Web Application Firewall), and SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response).
Independent research sources for vendor evaluation include Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, Forrester Wave reports, SE Labs testing programmes, and AV-TEST for endpoint security comparisons. Peer review platforms like G2 provide user experience data that analyst reports frequently miss. The CyberSanso Vendor Database is available at /research/vendors/ and covers over 400 vendors across 30 product categories.
AI-Powered Threat Intelligence and Emerging Cybersecurity Research in 2026
Artificial intelligence is changing both how security research is conducted and what it uncovers. AI-powered threat intelligence platforms process threat data at a scale and speed that is impossible for human analysts alone. Large language models are being used to summarise threat reports, extract IoCs from unstructured text, and generate hypotheses for threat hunting campaigns.
AI in Attacks: AI is enabling more sophisticated phishing at scale, automating vulnerability scanning, and generating malware variants that evade signature-based detection. AI-generated deepfakes are being used in social engineering attacks, with voice cloning in vishing campaigns a documented threat vector in 2024 and 2025.
Adversarial Machine Learning Research: Key research areas include crafting inputs that fool ML-based detection systems (adversarial examples), corrupting training data to degrade model accuracy (model poisoning), manipulating LLM-integrated security tools through malicious inputs (prompt injection), and AI-assisted malware development that generates novel code variants to evade static analysis.
Post-Quantum Cryptography Research: While practical quantum computers capable of breaking current encryption standards (RSA, ECC) do not yet exist, research into post-quantum cryptography is active. NIST published the first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024. Organisations with long data retention requirements should be aware of harvest-now-decrypt-later strategies, where encrypted data is collected today for decryption once quantum capability exists.
Cloud Security Research 2026: Cloud misconfiguration remains the leading cause of cloud data breaches. Research areas include identity-based attacks in cloud environments, container and Kubernetes security, serverless function security, and the security implications of multi-cloud architectures where traditional perimeter-based monitoring does not apply.
Start Researching With the CyberSanso Research Hub
The Research Hub is built for analysts, researchers, security architects, and IT teams who need structured, searchable intelligence without subscription fees. Every section is free to use. Start with the area most relevant to your current work.
Research Resources for Every Experience Level
The Research Hub is structured so analysts at every level can find what they need. Pick the track that matches your current role and research focus.
Analyst
Track
Security Analyst Track
For SOC analysts and security operations professionals.
Key research areas:
- CVE tracking and active vulnerability research
- Threat intelligence collection and IOC analysis
- MITRE ATT&CK tactic and technique navigation
- Incident statistics and breach data research
Start with Threat Intelligence and CVE sections
Researcher
Track
Security Researcher Track
For vulnerability researchers and offensive security professionals.
Key research areas:
- Zero-day vulnerability research and CVD process
- OSINT techniques and intelligence methodology
- Malware analysis and reverse engineering tools
- Attack technique documentation and ATT&CK mapping
Start with Vulnerability Research and Attack Library
Leader
Track
Security Leader Track
For CISOs, security architects, and compliance officers.
Key research areas:
- Framework research: NIST, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS
- Cybersecurity vendor evaluation and comparison
- Cybersecurity statistics for board-level reporting
- AI and emerging threat landscape research 2026
- Compliance research: GDPR, HIPAA, sector-specific
Start with Frameworks and Vendor Database
All three research tracks use the same free content inside the Research Hub. The tracks are a navigation guide, not a product. Go directly to the section most relevant to your current work, and use the search and filter tools inside each section to narrow by vendor, severity, framework, or threat actor type.
What Security Professionals Say About the CyberSanso Research Hub
Feedback from security analysts, researchers, compliance officers, and security leaders who use the CyberSanso Research Hub as part of their day-to-day security work.
Dr. Amara Nwosu
Threat Intelligence Analyst
The threat actor profiles and ATT&CK mapping saved our team weeks of manual research. Having structured intelligence in one place rather than spread across dozens of vendor reports is genuinely valuable for day-to-day operational work.
Tom Bradley
Security Architect
The vendor database and framework comparison sections are what I come back to most. Evaluating tools against each other with structured criteria rather than marketing materials is how you actually make sound procurement decisions.
Priya Mehta
SOC Manager
The CVE tracker with severity filtering is the first thing I check each morning. Having vulnerability data, exploit availability status, and affected vendor information in one view cuts our triage time significantly.
Carlos Reyes
Penetration Tester
The attack techniques library mapped to MITRE ATT&CK is an excellent planning resource. I use it to ensure coverage during engagements and to document findings in a way clients can immediately map to their defensive tooling.
Nadia Petrov
Compliance Officer
Framework research used to mean buying Gartner reports or reading 200-page standards documents. Having NIST, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 broken down and compared in one place cuts research time by a significant margin.
Jake Sullivan
CISO, Financial Services
The cybersecurity statistics section gives me the data I need for board presentations. Real breach numbers, ransomware frequency, and sector-specific incident rates presented clearly are what boards need to make informed risk investment decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Cybersecurity Research Hub
Common questions from analysts, researchers, and security teams using the CyberSanso Research Hub for threat intelligence, vulnerability research, framework analysis, and vendor evaluation.
A cybersecurity company protects businesses from digital threats by monitoring networks and devices, identifying vulnerabilities, responding to incidents, and implementing safeguards like firewalls, encryption, and endpoint protection. CyberSanso specifically combines managed monitoring, consulting, and hands on implementation so businesses get continuous protection rather than a one time setup that is never revisited.
Every business that stores customer data, processes payments, or relies on digital systems is a potential target. Recent data shows nearly half of all cyberattacks now target smaller organizations specifically because they often have fewer defenses than large enterprises. A single breach can cost tens of thousands of dollars in recovery, lost business, and reputational damage, often far more.
Cybersecurity consulting is expert guidance that assesses your current vulnerabilities, designs a security strategy specific to your business, and helps implement and maintain that strategy over time. Unlike a generic software purchase, consulting accounts for your actual industry, budget, and risk level. CyberSanso's consulting starts with a full risk assessment before recommending any specific solution.
Yes. Small businesses are attacked at a surprisingly high rate each year, and a significant share of all reported breaches now involve smaller organizations rather than large enterprises. Breach costs for small businesses commonly run into the tens of thousands of dollars and can exceed six figures once downtime, recovery, and notification costs are included. No business is too small to be a target.
Immediate steps include isolating affected systems, notifying your cybersecurity provider, assessing the scope of the breach, notifying any affected customers if data was exposed, restoring from clean backups, and conducting a forensic review to prevent recurrence. Having 24/7 monitoring in place before an attack happens means these steps start within minutes rather than after the damage has spread.
Audit pricing varies based on business size and the scope of systems being reviewed. CyberSanso's Basic Package includes a full risk assessment starting at $400 per month, with custom audit pricing available for businesses that need a deeper, standalone review. Contact us directly for a quote based on your specific environment and requirements.
A cybersecurity risk assessment identifies, evaluates, and prioritizes the vulnerabilities across your business systems, network, and data handling processes. It reveals exactly where you are most exposed to attack and forms the foundation for a tailored security strategy. CyberSanso includes a comprehensive risk assessment as the first step in every engagement, regardless of package.
Yes. Healthcare businesses need HIPAA aligned safeguards, financial firms need PCI DSS and regulatory compliance support, retail businesses need point of sale and payment security, and other industries carry their own specific requirements. CyberSanso designs every engagement around your specific industry and risk profile rather than applying a single template to every client.
At minimum, a small business needs network security, endpoint protection, around the clock monitoring, data encryption, and a plan for responding to phishing and ransomware attempts. Security consulting helps determine which of these need the most investment based on your specific risk level, since not every business faces identical threats in identical proportions.
Cost varies by scope and company size. Industry wide, managed security services for small businesses typically range from roughly $1,500 to $8,000 per month. CyberSanso's packages start at $400 per month specifically because we built our pricing for businesses that need real protection without that higher price range, while still covering the core protections every business needs.
IT security focuses on protecting an organization's IT assets and infrastructure from misuse or failure. Cybersecurity is broader, covering all digital threats including social engineering, cloud vulnerabilities, network attacks, and human risk factors. In short, IT security keeps your systems running, while cybersecurity keeps those systems safe from people actively trying to break in.
Look for clearly listed services, confirmed 24/7 response capability, transparent and upfront pricing, demonstrated experience in your industry, realistic response time commitments, support for any compliance requirements you face, and reviews from actual clients rather than vague testimonials. A provider unwilling to answer these questions directly is usually telling you something on its own.
No. CyberSanso operates as an independent cybersecurity platform, and our recommendations are not influenced by vendor partnerships or referral incentives. The vendor database, threat intelligence, and compliance content on this site are maintained as a free cybersecurity resource available to anyone, not only to clients who sign a contract with us.