The findings (Josh Lemon, SANS).

Data quality or quantity becomes the primary barrier to threat hunting, overtaking skilled staff for the first time in the survey's history. Living off the land leads for nation-state and organized crime actors. Cloud stays the hardest environment to hunt in. Formal measurement of threat hunting keeps slipping.

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"The Three Gaps the 2026 Data Won't Let Us Ignore" (Puneet Sethi, Dropzone AI).

Behavior-based hunting, the data problem underneath it, and why so few programs can prove any of it worked. Puneet argues that limits on data and time keep teams from producing the metrics they need to win the budget that would ease those limits, which leaves many threat hunting programs caught in a catch-22.

Sponsor sessions and panel.

ESET gives a vendor perspective on running threat hunting in-house versus outsourcing it. Wiz presents on threat hunting in the cloud. A moderated panel with speakers from the survey's sponsors follows and takes up what has to be in place before behavioral hunting is even possible.