What Attackers Do With Your Data in the First 60 Minutes
Thought Leadership Incident Response May 2026 · 8 min read In 2025, the fastest attacks moved from stolen credential to complete data exfiltration in 72 minutes — 4x faster than the year before. Most businesses discover breaches 292 days later. Here is exactly what an attacker does in that window — and what it means for your business before anyone has noticed. At 11:43pm on a Tuesday, an automated tool tests a stolen credential against your email platform. It matches. A session token is issued. In the next 72 minutes — while you sleep, while your team sleeps, while your IT provider sleeps — a sequence of events unfolds that will take your business an average of 292 days to discover. This is not a hypothetical. The 2026 Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report — Palo Alto Networks' annual analysis drawn from hundreds of real-world breach investigations — found that the fastest 25% of attacks in 2025 reached full da...