For years, compliance has given security teams a predictable rhythm: set controls, collect evidence, complete an assessment and prepare for the next review. That timetable made sense when systems changed more slowly and a periodic check could offer a reasonable picture of risk. It is becoming much less defensible in today’s cyber ecosystem.
The numbers demonstrate it. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found vulnerability exploitation accounted for 20% of breach initial access routes, up 34% year over year. For vulnerabilities in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, the median time to mass exploitation was five days; for a sampled set of edge device flaws, it was zero days. When attacks can move at that pace, compliance programs based on periodic reviews and evidence gathered for an annual audit risk documenting controls that no longer reflect an organization’s live exposure.
Marc Rubbinaccio, Head of Cybersecurity and Compliance at Secureframe, tells UC Today that this is why annual compliance programs are increasingly at odds with the pace of change. With AI adoption accelerating that gap, companies need to act.
Why a Point-in-Time Program No Longer Fits
AI does not need to invent entirely new attack techniques to change the risk equation. The risk comes from its ability to scale reconnaissance, phishing content, coding and exploitation work that attackers already understand. Verizon reported that the share of AI-assisted malicious emails had risen over two years, while the use of synthetically generated text in malicious emails doubled.
The same speed that lets attackers scale familiar techniques also exposes the limits of compliance programs that assess those defenses only once a year. As Rubbinaccio explains,
“organizations are using compliance programs that were built five, 10 years ago.”
These programs are point-in-time annual assessments typically. An annual process can leave organizations focused on proving controls were in place for an audit rather than checking whether they remain effective against a continuously changing threat environment.
The pressure is not only external. While attackers use AI to increase the speed and scale of familiar tactics, businesses are using it to accelerate development and internal workflows. That adoption can outpace the controls intended to govern it, especially as new tools are added or updated regularly. This leaves security teams balancing the benefits of faster iteration against new exposure, with budgets and resources set for a less complex, slower reporting environment.
Annual assessments cannot give security leaders a dependable view of risk when both the threats facing the business and the technology being introduced inside it are changing continuously. Compliance becomes useful only when it helps teams test whether core controls are still working as that change happens.
Making Compliance Useful Between Audits
Rubbinaccio’s answer is not to discard established frameworks. AI-enabled attacks still depend on weaknesses that security teams have long understood: unpatched systems, poor access management, insecure configurations and users fooled into handing over credentials.
