Time to Ransom is Money

This Huntress report analyzes ransomware "time-to-ransom" using investigated customer incidents, finding an average of roughly 17 hours from initial access to ransomware deployment (with some actors as fast as ~4 hours) and noting that many groups perform credential dumping, lateral movement, and data exfiltration prior to encryption. The report details methodology and visibility limitations, provides two incident case studies (including Akira), and recommends defenses such as offline encrypted backups, incident response playbooks, and SIEM-based detection to shorten response time and reduce impact.