48 Hours: The Window Between Infostealer Infection and Dark Web Sale

Whiteintel’s research maps the five-stage infostealer lifecycle — infection, harvest, packaging, marketplace listing, and exploitation — and demonstrates that stolen credentials and session tokens can appear for sale on dark web markets within 48 hours (often much sooner). The report cites large-scale telemetry (51.7 million stealer logs, 2.3 billion passwords) and links marketplace-exposed credentials to rapid ransomware follow-on activity, urging continuous dark-web monitoring, immediate remediation workflows, and adoption of phishing-resistant authentication (FIDO2/passkeys) to close the narrow response window.