Hackers Still Outpace Breach Detection, Containment Efforts

Research shows time to discovery and containment of breaches slowly shrinking, but attackers don’t need a very big window to do a lot of damage.

It’s breach report season and one of the prevailing trends uncovered by security researchers is that organizations are ever-so-slowly improving the window between when a compromise occurs and when it gets detected. In spite of this slight gain, the fact solidly remains that the typical breach timeline still completely favors attackers.

Book a demo today to see GlobalDots is action.

Optimize cloud costs, control spend, and automate for deeper insights and efficiency.

Book a demo today to see GlobalDots is action.

Two different reports this spring showed that organizations are shortening the time to discovery of data breaches. Most recently, the Trustwave 2019 Global Security Report released late last month found that the time between an intrusion and detection of that incident shrank almost in half. That study showed that the median time between intrusion and detection fell from 26 days in 2017 to 14 days in 2018.

This corroborates the downward trend in this statistic identified in March by the FireEye 2019 Mandiant M-Trends Report, though that study showed a more modest reduction and a much higher time between these important breach milestones. Mandiant found that the time between intrusion and detection went down from 101 days in 2017 to 78 days in 2018. That’s marked improvement from 2011, when Mandiant put that number at 426 days.

Mandiant uses a common parlance of “dwell time” for this statistic, though other experts have their own colorful terms. But they all agree that reduction should be a big priority for cybersecurity teams.

A close-up of a hand resting on a computer keyboard with illuminated keys and a dark background.

Read more: Dark Reading 

Latest Articles

Who Controls What Your Team Shares with AI? | Cloudflare Zero Trust Webinar

Your employees are using AI tools. You probably don’t know which ones, or what they’re sending.In this session, Ganesh The Awesome walks through how to close that gap in 30 minutes using Cloudflare Zero Trust and Cloudflare AI Gateway. Want to go deeper? We’re happy to run a 1-on-1 session tailored to your environment.

Ganesh The Awesome
29th July, 2026
In 2026, Most CDN Teams Still Find Out About Outages From Customers First

This post is based on a live panel webinar co-hosted by GlobalDots, Hydrolix, and AWS, where engineers and go-to-market leaders across CDN, edge, and agentic AI operations discussed what actually happens when delivery infrastructure breaks. Just five people on the call talking about where visibility fails today, and what changes once agents start watching the […]

Eduardo Rocha
15th July, 2026
From Alert to Action: A CDN & Edge Practitioners Summit

Most teams still learn about a CDN problem from a customer rather than from their own monitoring stack.In this panel, GlobalDots, Hydrolix, and AWS break down why that keeps happening and what it takes to fix it: full-fidelity data instead of sampled logs, and AI agents that can actually act on it. Full Webinar: Demo […]

Eduardo Rocha
15th July, 2026

Unlock Your Cloud Potential

Schedule a call with our experts. Discover new technology and get recommendations to improve your performance.

    GlobalDots' industry expertise proactively addressed structural inefficiencies that would have otherwise hindered our success. Their laser focus is why I would recommend them as a partner to other companies

    Marco Kaiser
    Marco Kaiser

    CTO

    Legal Services

    GlobalDots has helped us to scale up our innovative capabilities, and in significantly improving our service provided to our clients

    Antonio Ostuni
    Antonio Ostuni

    CIO

    IT Services

    It's common for 3rd parties to work with a limited number of vendors - GlobalDots and its multi-vendor approach is different. Thanks to GlobalDots vendors umbrella, the hybrid-cloud migration was exceedingly smooth

    Motti Shpirer
    Motti Shpirer

    VP of Infrastructure & Technology

    Advertising Services

    GlobalDots guided our migration to Cloudflare, implemented SSL for SaaS, eliminated certificate maintenance, and remained highly responsive throughout.

    Chris Cutajar
    Chris Cutajar

    Infrastructure Eng. & Security Manager