Today’s ransomware operators are increasingly turning to living-off-the-land (LOTL) tactics—easily blending into legitimate system activity, dumping credentials and evading shortsighted defenses. Each year, more attackers are chaining together sophisticated tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to infiltrate networks and hit as many systems as possible.
When one tactic fails, they pivot fast, pulling from step-by-step playbooks shared among seasoned operators and affiliates to keep their attack chains moving. In 2024, this kind of persistent agility cost organizations $4.88 million in breaches, a 10% increase from the previous year.
Some attacks unfold in just 74 minutes. Other attackers lurk undetected for a mean time of 258 days. Defenders aren’t just up against the clock, they’re also facing well-practiced attack chains with interchangeable strategies. Even though cutting a single choke point can sever 17,000 potential paths, most traditional methods only flag isolated alerts (disconnected signals that fail to reveal the full scope of an attack in progress), leaving defenders vulnerable to the next move problem.
Let’s face it, detecting one stage of an attack isn’t enough to stop attack progression anymore. Security teams need to shift to proactive strategies that anticipate beyond single steps and deliver the whole picture—only then will they be able to stay steps ahead of multi-stage attack sequences and shut them down.