Hackers Are Living in Your Network for 200+ Days: Here’s How to Evict Them Fast

If you think a cyberattack happens in one sudden burst, one quick hit, one big boom, you’re wrong. That’s the old narrative. The truth in 2025 is much more terrifying: hackers are already inside your network, and they’ve been there for months. The average dwell time, the amount of time an attacker lives inside your systems undetected, now exceeds 200 days. That’s more than six months of silent reconnaissance, data theft, and privilege escalation before anyone even realizes something is wrong.

The worst part? Most businesses only find out they’ve been compromised after the attacker is done and the damage is irreversible.

By the time the ransom note arrives, the backups are gone. The customer data is already on the dark web. Your email history has been sold, and your systems are being used to breach your partners. It’s not just your company that’s compromised, it’s your reputation, your operations, your future.

This is the harsh reality. And if your business is operating without the ability to detect, respond, and evict intruders in real-time, you’re not running a company. You’re managing an open house for threat actors.

Why Attackers Stick Around (And How They Get Away With It)

In 2025, attackers aren’t looking for smash-and-grab opportunities. They’re not in a rush. They’re patient, professional, and highly coordinated. Whether it’s a nation-state actor or a ransomware-as-a-service affiliate, the strategy is the same: get in, stay in, and extract maximum value before anyone notices.

Once they gain access, typically through phishing, credential stuffing, or exploiting a vulnerability, the attacker doesn’t go straight for the prize. That would be too obvious. Instead, they observe. They map out your infrastructure. They watch how your users behave. They identify critical systems, backup paths, and data repositories. All of this happens while your antivirus software gives you a green checkmark and your firewall reports “all clear.”

They’ll install backdoors and create hidden admin accounts. They’ll blend in with your normal traffic, mimicking user behavior to avoid detection. Many use “living off the land” tactics, abusing legitimate IT tools like PowerShell, WMI, or RDP, to move through your environment without triggering alarms. In fact, most of their activity is designed to be invisible to traditional security products.

This is how hackers dwell for over 200 days. And this is why you need more than just basic security tools. You need eyes inside your network—smart, trained, and ruthless about eliminating threats.

You Can’t Evict What You Can’t See

Most businesses are still relying on outdated models of cybersecurity: perimeter defense, passive monitoring, outsourced IT companies running daily scans. But the attackers are already inside the perimeter. They’re past the firewall. They’ve bypassed your MFA. They’re reading your internal emails and slowly building out a blueprint of your most valuable assets.

The problem isn’t just that you’ve been breached. The problem is that you don’t know where they are, how they got in, or what they’ve already taken.

You can’t evict what you can’t see. And that’s exactly what Lockstock was built to solve.

We deploy advanced detection and response platforms that monitor every endpoint, every user behavior, every privilege escalation attempt. We use behavioral analytics, not just signature-based scanning, to identify anomalies in real time. Our analysts don’t wait for the alarms to go off. We hunt threats. We assume breach. And we dig until we find the intruder, rip them out, and close the door behind them.

The Cost of Letting Them Linger

Every day an attacker remains inside your network, the cost multiplies. They’re not just stealing data. They’re embedding themselves deeper. They’re preparing for lateral movement. They’re setting up persistence mechanisms that will allow them to return even after you think you’ve removed them. In many cases, we’ve seen attackers remain inside an organization through multiple detection attempts because no one took the time to fully root them out.

The longer they stay, the more damage they do. Think about it: they’re watching your financial reports. They’re reading your vendor contracts. They’re accessing your email threads with legal and HR. They may not even hit you directly, they might use your systems to launch attacks on your customers or supply chain partners. Now your business is not just a victim. It’s a liability.

And when the breach finally surfaces, when the media catches wind, when the regulators come knocking, when your customers start asking hard questions, it will be too late to say, “We didn’t know.”

Rapid Detection Isn’t Optional Anymore

Speed is the difference between containment and catastrophe. If it takes your team hours or days to detect an intrusion, you’re already behind. If you’re waiting on a weekly report to see if anything suspicious happened, you’ve already lost.

At Lockstock, our approach is simple: detect early, respond aggressively, and evict fast. We build real-time detection into your infrastructure. We install managed EDR solutions on every endpoint. We monitor identity and access behavior. We integrate SIEM platforms that provide full visibility. And when something trips the wire, our incident response team acts instantly.

We don’t file a ticket and hope for a callback. We isolate systems, shut down sessions, trace lateral movement, and remove the attacker’s tools and backdoors, all before they have a chance to trigger ransomware or exfiltrate critical data.

Because in a 200-day breach scenario, every second you shave off the timeline is a win.

You Don’t Have to Be Their Host

Too many businesses act like victims before anything even happens. They convince themselves that being breached is inevitable, that there’s nothing they can do, that cybersecurity is too expensive or too complicated to manage. That’s nonsense.

You don’t have to be a host for cybercriminals. You don’t have to run your business with a ticking time bomb hiding in your servers. You just need the right partner, the one who understands how attackers operate and who fights fire with fire.

Lockstock was built for exactly this. We don’t sell false peace of mind. We don’t check boxes or hand out pretty reports. We hunt threats, we find intrusions, and we evict attackers fast. And once they’re gone, we make damn sure they don’t get back in.

If you think you’re too small to be a target, you’re already compromised. If you haven’t reviewed your logs or inspected your endpoints in weeks, they’re already living inside. And if your current provider hasn’t mentioned dwell time in a single conversation, you’re paying for a service that isn’t protecting you.

The Time to Act is Now

There is no excuse in 2025 for flying blind. Not when the stakes are this high. Not when attackers are living rent-free inside networks for over 200 days. And certainly not when Lockstock offers a better way.

You don’t need to wait for a breach to take cybersecurity seriously. You don’t need to let an attacker live inside your business for another day. You need visibility. You need speed. You need ruthless detection and surgical response.

You need Lockstock.

Think you’re clean? Prove it. Schedule a free threat posture assessment with Lockstock and let’s find out who’s really living in your network. If they’re in there, we’ll find them. And we’ll show them the door.