Why Is Dwell Time a Critical Security Risk?
Cyber adversaries operate with one goal in mind—stealth. The longer they go undetected in an environment, the more damage they can cause. Dwell time is the total amount of time that a threat remains unnoticed in a system, from initial compromise to discovery.
According to the most recent threat reports, the average dwell time for undetected breaches has reduced but remains at 10-15 days, providing attackers enough time to exfiltrate data, launch ransomware, or establish persistent access. Reducing dwell time can boost customer satisfaction by ensuring faster threat identification and response.
Organizations require Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions to counter this. XDR security unifies threat detection, incident response, and analytics across many security layers, significantly lowering dwell time and breach damage.
What’s the Impact of Dwell Time?
Dwell time is one of the most powerful security metrics – the more time an attacker can dwell within one of your systems undetected, the more damage they can do. Having longer dwell times can negatively impact in many areas including data security, financial issues, operational efficiency and brand reputation.
1. Increased Risk of Data Breaches
Longer dwell times give attackers more opportunities to exfiltrate sensitive data, including customer records, intellectual property, and financial information. Threat actors often leverage prolonged access to:
- Steal credentials to move laterally across the network.
- Extract confidential business data for resale on the dark web or ransom.
- Modify or delete critical files, leading to data loss and operational disruptions.
2. Higher Financial Costs
The financial impact of extended dwell time can be devastating. According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, breaches that take over 200 days to detect cost an average of USD 5.46 million, significantly more than those detected within 200 days. Key cost factors include:
- Incident response and forensic investigations to determine the scope of the attack.
- Regulatory fines and legal fees due to non-compliance with data protection laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
- Ransomware payments if attackers deploy encryption-based extortion tactics.
- Operational downtime and lost productivity from IT remediation efforts.
Extended dwell time in cybersecurity can be likened to demurrage and detention charges in logistics, where prolonged container or trailer usage incurs significant costs.
3. Reputational Damage and Customer Distrust
A persistent security incident may cause stakeholders, partners, and customers to lose faith in you. Businesses that don’t promptly identify and eliminate dangers run the risk of:
- Negative media exposure, impacting brand credibility.
- Customer churn, as users move to competitors with stronger security postures.
- Decreased investor confidence, leading to potential stock price drops.
4. Increased Complexity in Incident Response
The longer a threat actor goes unnoticed, the more time to develop persistence and avoid detection. This can:
- Extend the time required for forensic analysis, making it harder to determine the attack's origin and scope.
- Require more extensive remediation efforts, such as reimaging systems, rotating credentials, and patching vulnerabilities.
- Delay containment, increasing the chances of further exploitation.
5. Disrupted Business Operations
Long-term undetected cyberattacks have the potential to seriously impair vital business operations. Organizations could encounter:
- Service outages, impacting customer-facing applications.
- Supply chain disruptions, if attackers compromise critical third-party vendors.
- System slowdowns or lockouts, preventing employees from accessing essential tools and data.
Strategies to Reduce Dwell Time
Reducing dwell time is critical for minimizing cybersecurity risks and preventing attackers from maintaining a foothold in an organization’s network. Security teams can implement proactive measures to detect and respond to threats faster, reducing the potential for data breaches and system compromise.
1. Deploying XDR for Full-Spectrum Visibility
Unified threat visibility across endpoints, networks, email, and cloud environments is offered via XDR.
Benefits of XDR in reducing dwell time:
- Correlates data across multiple security layers to detect hidden threats.
- Identifies lateral movement to prevent attackers from expanding their reach.
- Enhances automated responses to mitigate threats before they escalate.
2. Automating Threat Detection and Response
Manual security processes increase response times, allowing attackers to persist longer. Automated security solutions can accelerate containment by:
- Using AI-driven analytics to detect behavioral anomalies in real time
- Orchestrating rapid response actions such as isolating infected systems.
- Eliminating manual triaging delays through automated alert prioritization.
3. Conducting Regular Security Training
One of the primary causes of cyber incidents continues to be human mistakes. Regular security awareness training guarantees that staff members and security teams can:
- Recognize phishing attempts and social engineering tactics.
- Respond efficiently to security incidents, minimizing containment delays.
- Follow best practices for secure access controls and threat reporting.
- Suggested Reading: Detect Phishing in Minutes vs. Months
4. Leveraging Threat Intelligence for Preemptive Defense
Real-time threat intelligence helps security teams identify and block emerging attack patterns before they cause damage.
Benefits of integrating threat intelligence:
- Early identification of complex threats like zero-day exploits and APTs.
- Enhanced threat-hunting capabilities by mapping attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)
- Reduced event investigation times, resulting in quicker mitigation.
5. Addressing Operational Inefficiencies to Minimize Dwell Time
Beyond technical defenses, addressing cybersecurity inefficiencies can further reduce dwell time:
- Eliminating alert fatigue by refining detection rules to reduce false positives.
- Optimizing security workflows to ensure faster threat correlation.
- Integrating security tools for seamless data sharing and response automation.
The Business Impact of Reducing Dwell Time
By implementing these strategic measures, organizations can:
- Strengthen security posture by limiting attacker dwell time.
- Ensure faster detection and response, reducing financial and reputational damage.
- Enhance operational efficiency, ensuring better security coordination and faster recovery.
Proactive XDR: Elevate Threat Detection, Deception, and Response
Discover how Fidelis Elevate® enhances cyber defense with:
- Real-time visibility
- Automated detection & response to reduce dwell time.
- Advanced deception
What Contributes to Excessive Dwell Time in Cybersecurity?
Several factors contribute to extended dwell times, making it difficult for security teams to detect and contain threats effectively:
- Siloed Security Tools: Traditional security solutions operate in isolation, making it harder to correlate attack signals across endpoints, networks, and cloud environments.
- Alert Fatigue: Security teams deal with thousands of false-positives every day, which causes them to miss critical threats.
- Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs): To get passed conventional defenses, threat actors employ complex evasion strategies.
- Lack of Contextual Insights: Security analysts often struggle with fragmented data, slowing down investigations and response efforts.
- Complex IT Environments & Legacy Systems: Unpatched vulnerabilities, multi-cloud complexity, and outdated security tools contribute to longer detection times. This is similar to how complex loads in logistics, which consist of mixed pallets for multiple clients, require more time and effort to sort and distribute.
- Insider Threats & Privileged Access Misuse: Malicious insiders or compromised privileged accounts might go undetected for extended periods, making it difficult to respond promptly. Extended dwell time can disrupt the entire operation, much like delays in logistics.
Tracking & Measuring Dwell Time
To improve cybersecurity response and lower the risk of prolonged attacker, dwell time must be tracked and measured effectively. Security teams evaluate the effectiveness of threat detection and response processes using real-time data and KPIs.
1. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
MTTD measures the average time it takes to identify a threat from the moment it infiltrates the system until security tools or analysts detect it.
- A low MTTD indicates strong threat visibility and rapid detection.
- A high MTTD suggests blind spots in security coverage, allowing attackers to persist longer.
Factors affecting MTTD:
- Alert overload and false positives delaying real threats from being identified.
- Lack of automation in correlating suspicious activity.
- Ineffective threat intelligence, failing to recognize evolving attack patterns.
2. Mean Time to Respond (MTTR)
MTTR represents the time taken to investigate, contain, and neutralize a threat after detection. Similarly, reducing idle times in logistics through efficient dock scheduling and load planning can significantly improve overall operational efficiency.
- A low MTTR means faster incident response, minimizing potential damage.
- A high MTTR indicates delays in security workflows, increasing the risk of data breaches and system compromises.
Factors contributing to increased MTTR:
- Manual investigation processes, slowing down containment efforts.
- Lack of integration between security tools, requiring multiple steps to mitigate threats.
- Skill shortages, with overwhelmed security teams unable to triage incidents effectively.
3. Dwell Time Reduction Rate
This metric indicates the percentage progress in reducing attacker dwell time during a given time.
Formula:
- A higher reduction rate signals enhanced detection and response capabilities.
- A stagnant or negative rate indicates persistent security gaps, requiring immediate remediation efforts.
4. Role of Real-Time Data in Reducing Dwell Time
Leveraging real-time threat intelligence and analytics helps in:
- Detecting anomalies faster by identifying behavioral deviations.
- Automating response actions to contain threats before they escalate.
- Pinpointing inefficiencies in security workflows, enabling proactive improvements.
- Enhancing visibility across cloud, network, and endpoint environments to prevent undetected lateral movement
How Does XDR Security Help Reduce Dwell Time?
XDR combines and correlate data from endpoints, networks, email, and cloud environments to offer a unified security approach.
XDR enables continuous improvement by routinely assessing and analyzing security measures, enabling companies to identify inefficiencies and put data-driven plans into place for advancing improvements.
1. Cross-Layered Threat Correlation
XDR provides a single pane of glass for faster threat analysis by gathering and correlating threat telemetry across several attack surfaces, compared to conventional SIEMs and EDRs.
2. Automated Threat Detection and Response
XDR utilizes AI-driven analytics and behavioral detection models to spot anomalies in real-time, ensuring that security teams act before adversaries establish persistence. Minimizing dwell time is crucial to avoid missed delivery windows in logistics.
3. Incident Prioritization & Root Cause Analysis
XDR helps analysts find the root causes more quickly by combining contextual data from several sources, which reduces investigation times and boosts response effectiveness.
4. Threat Hunting & Forensic Analysis
XDR enables proactive threat hunting by leveraging historical attack data, allowing teams to discover hidden threats that might otherwise go undetected.
Why Choose Fidelis XDR Solution for Reducing Dwell Time?
Fidelis XDR is designed for proactive cyber defense, with deep visibility, active threat detection, and automated response to reduce attacker dwell time.
The Fidelis Elevate® Advantage
- Reduces dwell time with deep visibility and high-fidelity detections
- Speeds up response with automated threat containment.
- Strengthens security posture by integrating proactive deception and analytics.
Organizations that opted for Fidelis XDR solution can detect, hunt, and neutralize threats faster, resulting in a more cyber-secure environment.
Bottom Line
Reducing dwell time is critical for current cyber resilience. XDR security enables organizations to detect, investigate, and respond to threats before they do significant damage. Enterprises that deploy solutions like Fidelis Elevate® can significantly minimize dwell time while boosting their overall security posture.
Frequently Ask Questions
What types of cyber threats benefit from extended dwell times?
Threats that exploit long dwell times to establish persistence and maximize damages are:
- Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
- Ransomware
- Insider threats
- Credential-based attacks
How can organizations measure the effectiveness of their dwell time reduction efforts?
Improvements in threat detection and response are monitored by key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Dwell Time Reduction Rate, Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).
What role does deception technology play in reducing dwell time?
Deception technology creates decoys and traps that lure attackers into revealing their presence early, shortening dwell time by exposing threats before they can cause damage.
