Global organizations are improving their attack detection capabilities despite facing increasingly sophisticated, persistent, and creative adversaries. The Mandiant M-Trends 2023 report, now in its fourteenth year, revealed that the global median dwell time – calculated as the median number of days an attacker is present in a target’s environment before detection – dropped to 16 days in 2022. This is the shortest median global dwell time from all M-Trends reporting periods.
The reduction in median dwell time reflects the key role partnerships and the exchange of information play in building a more resilient cybersecurity ecosystem, according to Mandiant. That said, several findings from this year’s report demonstrate that adversaries are progressively more sophisticated, persistent, and confident, as evidenced by hundreds of new malware families, extensive cyber espionage campaigns by nation-state-backed actors, and novel aggressive, personal tactics that ignore the traditional cyber rules of engagement.