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Two Clocks.
Threat intelligence is not a feed. It is the discovery that you and your attacker are running on different time.
two clocks, running at once
22
seconds
The attacker's clock
Median time from initial access to hand-off to a second criminal group, 2025.
vs
43
days
Your clock
Median time to fully remediate a known-exploited vulnerability, same period.
Most people picture a cyberattack as an event. Someone breaks in; you find out; you respond. Event, then reaction.
It is not an event. It is a race between two clocks, and almost nobody has looked at both faces at once.
The attacker’s clock.
In incident response work covering 2025, the median time from an attacker gaining initial access to handing that access off to a second criminal group was measured at twenty-two seconds. In 2022 the same measurement was over eight hours. Access brokers now sell what they take almost instantly, which means the group that got in is often not the group that will hurt you.
Further up the chain, roughly one in four newly exploited vulnerabilities were attacked on or before the day they were publicly disclosed — nearer three in ten across the prior full year. One major incident response practice calculated an average time-to-exploit of minus seven days — meaning that, on average, exploitation is now occurring before a fix exists.
Your clock.
Measured separately, by a different research body, over a broadly overlapping period: only about a quarter of the known-exploited vulnerabilities tracked were fully remediated by the organizations affected, and the median time to remediate was forty-three days, up from thirty-two the year before.
These are not two ends of one stopwatch — different bodies, different populations, different methods. Put side by side they describe something more useful than a race: a structural mismatch. Twenty-two seconds against forty-three days is not a gap you close by working harder, and recognizing that is what threat intelligence is actually for.
Here is why that matters more than it sounds. Almost every security decision an owner makes is implicitly a bet about time. We’ll patch that next cycle. We’ll look at the alert Monday. We’ll write the response plan when things calm down. Each is a reasonable sentence in a business context and an unreasonable one against a twenty-two-second handoff.
The correction is not panic. It is a small number of decisions that stop depending on your speed.
Why that matters more than it sounds
Almost every security decision an owner makes is implicitly a bet about time. We'll patch that next cycle. We'll look at the alert Monday. We'll write the response plan when things calm down. Each is a reasonable sentence in a business context and an unreasonable one against a twenty-two-second handoff.
The correction is not panic. It is a small number of decisions that stop depending on your speed.
01
Move controls from reactive to standing.
A password stolen four years ago still works unless something structural stops it — which is why one campaign against cloud data platforms succeeded using credentials harvested in 2020. Multi-factor authentication doesn't need you to be fast. It needs you to have done it once.
02
Buy someone else’s clock.
The reason monitoring is worth its cost is not the technology. It is that a night, a weekend and a holiday are all periods during which your clock stops and your attacker’s does not. Notice how many of the incidents in our library began on a Friday or a holiday weekend. That is not coincidence; it is target selection.
03
Decide the unrecoverable things in advance.
What you’d shut down, who you’d call, what you would not wipe. Decisions made in the first hour are worth more than decisions made well.
Threat intelligence sold as a feed of indicators is largely useless to an organization without a security team to consume it. Threat intelligence as a corrective on your intuition about time is useful to everyone — because that intuition was formed in a world where the other clock ran slower. It doesn't anymore. Assume the twenty-two seconds. Build for it.
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