CYBERSECURITY

Fuelled by hybrid work and cloud adoption, an organisation’ s attack surface now extends to every home office and coffee shop where an employee connects.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says this new era demands a“ new digital fabric for collaboration” – but with this fabric comes unprecedented risk. With the endpoint also now the perimeter, a modern defence strategy is a critical business imperative as the window between compromise and damage has shrunk from days to minutes.

The challenges endpoint security faces CrowdStrike’ s research reveals that, in 2024, the average eCrime“ breakout time” – the interval between an initial host compromise and lateral movement within the victim organisation – stood at 48 minutes, down from 62 minutes the year before. The quickest breakout time? Just 51 seconds. On top of this, Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 found that in 19 % of cases, data theft occurs within the first hour of a cyberattack. This velocity, driven by automation and AI, far outpaces human response capabilities.

Compounding this is a shift toward stealth. Attackers now favor living-off-theland( LOTL) techniques, abusing legitimate tools like PowerShell to avoid detection.

CrowdStrike adds that a staggering 81 % of intrusions are now malwarefree, rendering traditional antivirus protection obsolete.

On top of this, ransomware has also evolved into multi-layered extortion, with 86 % of incidents now involving intentional business disruption on top of data encryption and theft, Plato Alto’ s 2025 Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report finds.

118 October 2025