Malware-Free Attacks, Shorter Breakout Time: Why You Need Adversary Simulation Testing

Apr 2, 2025 | Information Security

CrowdStrike recently released its 2025 Global Threat Report with new insights into today’s emerging and shifting threat landscape. As our team dug through the report, two key findings stood out – the surge of malware-free cyber-attacks and the significant decrease in the time it takes a hacker to move laterally within a network. These insights show that hackers are becoming more efficient and stealthier. This means that businesses cannot rely on traditional security measures anymore – they need to proactively validate their security processes against real-world threats. Adversary simulation testing is a great way to evaluate defenses, ensuring systems can quickly detect, respond to, and contain threats before they cause damage.

In this blog post, we explore key findings from the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report and discuss why adversary simulation testing is essential to stay ahead of advanced threats.

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CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report: Our key takeaways

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Hackers can break in and gain access to your data in a record 48 minutes:

Breakout time refers to the time it takes cybercriminals to move laterally within a network to reach valuable data once they gain initial access. The CrowdStrike report found that the average eCrime breakout time dropped to 48 minutes in 2024, with the fastest recorded at just 51 seconds. This means that businesses have less than an hour – or even a minute – to detect and contain a threat before it penetrates deeper into the system.

With such a narrow window of time, businesses cannot afford to be caught off guard by undetected vulnerabilities or have any delays in their incident response.

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79% of detections in 2024 were malware-free:

CrowdStrike found that 79% of observed detections in 2024 were malware-free, up from 40% in 2019. The report noted that hackers are employing hands-on-keyword actions that mimic legitimate user or administrator behavior.

These sophisticated tactics make detection through traditional antivirus solutions and signature-based monitoring increasingly ineffective.

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The need for adversary simulation testing

As the threat landscape becomes increasingly complicated, staying ahead of hackers is more important than ever. During adversary simulation testing, cybersecurity professionals emulate the tools, techniques, and procedures of real-world threat actors to evaluate your business’ threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities. This assessment provides critical insights into how quickly and effectively your team and overall security operations mitigate a potential attack. Through this assessment, you can identify weaknesses to strengthen your incident detection and response strategies.

Here’s how adversary simulation testing can help your business address security challenges, including faster breakout time and malware-free attacks.

Identify weaknesses in security processes

With adversary simulation testing, you can validate your existing defenses against today’s evolving threats and hacker techniques. This helps identify vulnerabilities in your security processes and technologies that must be mitigated so your business is ready to tackle more sophisticated and targeted attacks.

Mimics malware-free attacks

By simulating malware-free techniques, adversary simulation testing can help your business validate and fine-tune existing security controls to better detect abnormal behavior and mitigate threats faster.

Measures detection & response time

Adversary simulation testing provides a low-risk setting to evaluate how your team and tools react to a real-world threat, helping you find and close any gaps in your security programs. Through simulated attacks, cybersecurity professionals can also determine lateral movement within the breakout time threshold. This gives you a clear picture of the speed of your existing defenses and how hackers may breach your systems.

Validates security investments

Simulated attacks can demonstrate whether your existing security processes and technologies are equipped to tackle real-world threats. Once you understand what’s working and what isn’t, you can prioritize security investments and strategies to strengthen your overall defenses.
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GraVoc can perform adversary simulation testing for your business!

Our adversary simulation services combine Red, Blue, and Purple Team exercises with MITRE ATT&CK threat intelligence to test your defenses against fast-moving, malware-free attacks, and more. Partner with us to identify security gaps, improve detection, and enhance incident response

Click below to explore our adversary simulation services or contact us today to get started!

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