Cyberattacks are becoming more and more advanced every day, and attackers often stay hidden in networks for long periods during the dwell time. Understanding dwell time helps organizations defend themselves and reduce damage.
What Is Dwell Time?
It is the time gap between when an attacker gets into the network and when they are caught by the security team. This is the time they can execute their operations quietly.
During this time, attackers can:
- Move laterally across systems to gain access to sensitive areas
- Escalate privileges to gain administrator-level control
- Exfiltrate critical or confidential data
- Set up ways to stay hidden in the system
- Launch ransomware or other harmful attacks
The risk of damage increases with dwell duration. Faster identification and response, on the other hand, limit the breadth of a breach and lessen the attacker’s opportunity to operate.
Why Dwell Time Matters
Dwell time directly impacts security and organizational risk in key ways:
- Exposure Window: When an attacker can stay unnoticed for a longer period of time, they can cause so much damage and gain more access to move through the networks.
- Financial and Operational Impact: More dwell time leads to more financial impact for remediation since it can make organizations face regulatory fines, operational downtime, and reputational damage.
- Security Maturity: Shorter dwell times show that an organization can monitor, detect, and respond to threats well. Quick detection usually means stronger overall security.
- Insight into Attacker Behavior: Monitoring dwell time patterns aids in comprehending how attackers adjust. For instance, ransomware attacks stay for a shorter time period as the attackers move quickly for data encryption. A long stay of such threats indicates a persistent and extremely harmful breach, which is hard for the security team to identify.
- Strategic Planning: Metrics around dwell time are valuable details for leaders to understand the importance of defense methods and take decisions on the right investment in detection, mitigation and response.
Strategies to Reduce Dwell Time
Dwell time can be reduced with a comprehensive strategy that uses:
- Technology
- Procedures
- Staff knowledge
Effective actions consist of:
- Enhanced Visibility: Gather extensive information from identity platforms, networks, cloud systems, and endpoints. By reducing blind spots that an attacker could exploit, centralized monitoring and correlation of events aid in the prompt detection of anomalies.
- Behavioral Detection and Automation: Traditional tools alone don’t work. Behavioral and anomaly detection identify new threats, and automated alerts help respond faster.
- Proactive Threat Hunting: Instead of waiting for alerts, teams must look for early breach signs. Red-team exercises help uncover gaps in detection and response.
- Prepared Incident Response: Just as crucial as early diagnosis is quick containment. With a clear response plan, defined roles, and automated tools, organizations can act quickly during a breach.
- Tracking Metrics: Tracking MTTD and MTTR helps spot weaknesses and reduce dwell time.
- Employee Awareness and Processes: Human mistakes are often how attackers get in. Strong access controls, frequent training, phishing testing, and well-defined procedures all aid in preventing invasions. Updating response plans helps apply lessons from past crises effectively.
Conclusion
Dwell time shows how long attackers can stay hidden and how strong an organization’s cybersecurity is. Longer dwell times mean higher risk and cost, while shorter dwell times show effective and responsive security.
