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Vol. 1 · Ed. 2026
CyberGlossary
Entry № 405

Dwell Time

Dwell Time 是什么?

Dwell TimeThe interval between an adversary's initial compromise of an environment and the defender's detection of that compromise — a headline industry metric reported annually by IR firms such as Mandiant.


Dwell time is the duration between initial intrusion and detection (sometimes broken into 'attacker dwell' until any defender action and 'detection dwell' until first confirmed alert). It is the single most cited efficacy metric in industry incident-response reports — Mandiant's M-Trends, IBM/Ponemon, CrowdStrike — and tracks how successful defenders are at finding adversaries before they finish their objectives. Historically median dwell times were measured in many months (Mandiant reported 416 days in 2011); by 2023–2024 medians had fallen to around 10 days globally for externally-notified incidents and a few days for ransomware-driven cases, both because attackers moved faster (ransomware shifted to days-to-encryption) and because defenders deployed better tooling (EDR, SIEM rule coverage, MDR). Dwell time alone can be misleading — fast detection of a brief intrusion may be worse than slow detection of a long one — so mature programs report it alongside Mean Time to Contain and Mean Time to Recover.

示例

  1. 01

    A red-team retrospective records a 21-day dwell from initial AWS key compromise to first alert; the after-action focuses on cloud-control-plane detections.

  2. 02

    A board update reports that median dwell time fell from 32 days last year to 7 days this year following EDR + MDR rollout.

常见问题

Dwell Time 是什么?

The interval between an adversary's initial compromise of an environment and the defender's detection of that compromise — a headline industry metric reported annually by IR firms such as Mandiant. 它属于网络安全的 防御与运营 分类。

Dwell Time 是什么意思?

The interval between an adversary's initial compromise of an environment and the defender's detection of that compromise — a headline industry metric reported annually by IR firms such as Mandiant.

Dwell Time 是如何工作的?

Dwell time is the duration between initial intrusion and detection (sometimes broken into 'attacker dwell' until any defender action and 'detection dwell' until first confirmed alert). It is the single most cited efficacy metric in industry incident-response reports — Mandiant's M-Trends, IBM/Ponemon, CrowdStrike — and tracks how successful defenders are at finding adversaries before they finish their objectives. Historically median dwell times were measured in many months (Mandiant reported 416 days in 2011); by 2023–2024 medians had fallen to around 10 days globally for externally-notified incidents and a few days for ransomware-driven cases, both because attackers moved faster (ransomware shifted to days-to-encryption) and because defenders deployed better tooling (EDR, SIEM rule coverage, MDR). Dwell time alone can be misleading — fast detection of a brief intrusion may be worse than slow detection of a long one — so mature programs report it alongside Mean Time to Contain and Mean Time to Recover.

如何防御 Dwell Time?

针对 Dwell Time 的防御通常结合技术控制与运营实践,详见上方完整定义。

Dwell Time 还有哪些其他名称?

常见的别称包括: Attacker dwell time, Compromise-to-detect time。

相关术语