Proactive Cyber Resilience: Lessons from M-Trends and DBIR 2025 and How RedSeal Leads the Way
In an era of relentless cyber threats, the recently published Mandiant M-Trends 2025 and Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) present an urgent call to action for organizations worldwide. Both reports deliver sobering insights: attackers are becoming faster, stealthier, and more sophisticated, while defenders still struggle with visibility gaps, sluggish response times, and fragmented defenses.
Key findings from M-Trends 2025 and Verizon DBIR 2025
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Dwell time reduction: Mandiant reports a median dwell time of 11 days, a significant improvement from previous years. However, attackers are exploiting this compressed window with more aggressive, highly targeted tactics, increasing the stakes for early detection and response.
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External detection dominance: Despite gains in internal security monitoring, 55% of breaches are still detected by third parties, according to M-Trends. This highlights enduring internal blind spots and the continued need for better internal visibility and threat detection.
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Credential theft and misuse surge: Verizon’s DBIR reveals that over 65% of breaches involved stolen or misused credentials, emphasizing the need for strengthened identity and access management practices.
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Complex attack paths: Attackers are no longer relying on single vulnerabilities. Instead, they chain vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments, rendering traditional linear defense models ineffective.
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Speed of attack: According to DBIR, the time between initial compromise and data exfiltration has shrunk dramatically, often occurring within hours, if not minutes. Speed has become an adversary’s greatest weapon.
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Misconfigurations in cloud environments: Both reports point out the rise in breaches due to misconfigured cloud assets, particularly around storage permissions, access policies, and lack of segmentation.
These trends make it clear: visibility, proactive defense, and rapid response are no longer “nice-to-haves”; they are mission-critical to survival and success in the digital age.
Where RedSeal fits in: Building proactive cyber resilience
RedSeal’s platform is uniquely positioned to help organizations not just react to breaches, but prevent, anticipate, and accelerate response to threats. Here’s how RedSeal aligns with the challenges highlighted in the 2025 reports:
- Comprehensive network visibility: RedSeal creates an up-to-date, dynamic model of your entire hybrid environment — across cloud, data center, and remote assets. This comprehensive visibility directly addresses the gaps that lead to third-party breach detection, empowering organizations to see and secure every node, every connection, and every exposure point.
- Attack path management and threat prioritization: Given the increasingly complex and multi-stage attacks noted in both reports, RedSeal’s Attack Path Management identifies all exploitable paths that adversaries could take. It simulates potential attacks across your network and cloud, giving security teams the foresight needed to remediate high-risk vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
- Prioritized risk mitigation: RedSeal goes beyond identifying vulnerabilities; it provides context, showing which exposures are reachable and exploitable based on actual network access. This prioritization ensures security teams focus their efforts where they will have the most impact, closing the doors attackers are most likely to use.
- Exposure analysis across the environment: While RedSeal does not directly analyze credential risks, it excels at identifying exposed assets, misconfigurations, and unintended access paths that attackers could exploit, thereby reducing the opportunities for credential misuse and lateral movement.
- Accelerated incident response and forensics: In a world where breaches unfold rapidly, RedSeal equips responders with a detailed, continuously updated map of network topology, configurations, and security controls. During an incident, responders can rapidly determine the blast radius, identify affected systems, isolate critical assets, and formulate an effective containment and remediation plan — all while saving critical hours or even days.
- Cloud security posture management: As misconfigured cloud assets become a leading cause of breaches, RedSeal provides organizations with visibility into their cloud posture. It ensures cloud environments are configured according to best practices and regulatory standards, identifying risky configurations and unauthorized changes before they can be exploited.
- Compliance and audit readiness: With increasing regulatory scrutiny and evolving standards, RedSeal’s audit-ready reports simplify compliance efforts. It helps organizations demonstrate effective network segmentation, access controls, risk management, and cloud security governance, supporting compliance with frameworks like NIST, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and more.
RedSeal and the CTEM Framework: Supporting Continuous Threat Exposure Management
RedSeal supports CTEM initiatives by providing continuous visibility into network and cloud exposures, modeling attack paths, and prioritizing remediation based on true risk. By integrating into an organization’s CTEM strategy, RedSeal helps security teams make more informed, risk-based decisions to strengthen overall cyber resilience.
Don’t just react. Anticipate and evolve.
The insights from Mandiant and Verizon make one thing crystal clear: the adversary is evolving at an unprecedented pace — and so must we. Organizations that invest in proactive visibility, attack path analysis, exposure management, cloud security posture management, and risk-informed decision-making will stand apart in an increasingly hostile threat landscape.
With RedSeal, security teams move from reactive firefighting to strategic resilience-building. They don’t just detect attacks — they prevent them. They don’t just recover — they thrive.
The future belongs to those who anticipate threats, manage risk intelligently, and build deep cyber resilience. RedSeal is here to help you lead that future.
Interested in learning how RedSeal can strengthen your cyber resilience and help you turn today’s security challenges into tomorrow’s strategic advantages? Contact us to schedule a personalized demo and see RedSeal in action.
