esentry latest report says localised cyberattacks can cripple enterprise systems in just five days

• esentry’s 2025 threat intelligence analysis reveals that African organisations now have as little as five days between initial attacker access and fullscale enterprise compromise, as threat actors use automation, identity driven techniques, and “livingofftheland” tools to move silently and faster across corporate environments.
• With over 31 billion security events processed, 3.5 million alerts generated, and 15,000 malicious attempts blocked in 2025, esentry found that attackers typically complete reconnaissance—mapping networks, profiling users, and identifying highvalue systems—within the first week, making rapid detection and coordinated response critical to preventing ransomware, data theft, and operational disruption
• The report urges boards and executives to treat cybersecurity as an operational and governance priority, not a tooling exercise. esentry’s integrated “Phalanx” model—combining defence, intelligence, and engineering—has cut containment time for lowcomplexity incidents to under 90 seconds, a necessary benchmark as shrinking dwell times render slow approvals, siloed systems, and fragmented security processes untenable.

African organisations may have as little as five days to stop a cyber intrusion before it escalates into a full-scale enterprise breach, according to a new report by Lagos-based cybersecurity firm esentry.

The company’s 2025 annual report, The Evolved Phalanx, shows that the window for effective response is shrinking, as attackers move from initial access to enterprise-wide impact in a matter of days, not weeks.

What esentry’s data shows about the speed of modern enterprise compromise

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The report is anchored on large-scale monitoring across 2025. esentry says it processed over 31 billion individual security events during the year, generating 3.5 million alerts and blocking more than 15,000 malicious attempts. That telemetry, the company argues, reveals a consistent pattern: attackers are compressing the time between initial access and meaningful control of an environment.

Rather than lingering for months, adversaries now move quickly from entry, often via compromised credentials, phishing, or exposed services, into reconnaissance. esentry’s position is that by day five, many threat actors have already mapped networks, identified high-value systems, and profiled user behaviour well enough to plan privilege escalation and lateral movement. From there, the report says, the path to execution, data theft, ransomware, or operational sabotage can unfold within roughly two weeks, but the decisive “s_wing point”_ is that first week, when visibility and containment still favour defenders.

Why the “five-day window” is shrinking across African enterprises

esentry links the faster tempo to two overlapping shifts. First is the growing use of automation (and increasingly AI-enabled scanning) to enumerate assets, detect weaknesses, and accelerate internal discovery. Second is the rising preference for “living-off-the-land” techniques, in which attackers abuse legitimate tools, valid credentials, and routine admin utilities to blend into normal operations and evade traditional signature-based alerts.

The practical outcome is a quieter intrusion that advances faster: fewer noisy malware artefacts, more trusted access, and a higher likelihood that security teams only notice the breach when the attacker is already positioned for impact.

Sector pressure points: why attackers don’t need weeks anymore

The report’s central warning lands hardest on sectors where downtime or fraud has immediate consequences. In healthcare, the business risk is not abstract: ransomware-driven disruption can quickly paralyse access to patient systems. In financial services, credential theft and info-stealer activity can lead to rapid unauthorised access and fraudulent attempts. In telecoms, phishing-led credential harvesting can provide a foothold that scales into broader compromise, especially where identity governance is inconsistent and privileged access is sprawling.

esentry’s core argument is that across these sectors, trusted access has become the shortest route from entry to enterprise-wide damage, meaning the timeline collapses wherever identity controls and monitors lag digital expansion.

“Nigeria is no longer dealing with opportunistic cybercrime” — esentry CBO

Reacting to the shift the company is observing in-market, Gbolabo Awelewa, Chief Business Officer at esentry, frames the threat as more deliberate, identity-driven, and operationally patient than the “quick hit” cybercrime many organisations still plan for.

“What we are seeing across Nigerian and African enterprises is not just an increase in attacks, but a fundamental change in how fast they unfold. Five days is now enough time for a determined attacker to understand an environment and prepare to cripple it. Organisations that are not built for rapid detection and response are operating with a dangerous blind spot,” Awelewa said.

In his broader remarks on the report’s findings, Awelewa points to organised campaigns that exploit trust relationships and internal access pathways, an approach that makes early detection harder and raises the stakes for response speed.

What esentry says works: coordinated defence, not siloed security tools

A major theme in the report is that security failures increasingly happen at the seams—between monitoring and response, between threat intelligence and engineering, and between technical containment and business continuity decisions. esentry positions its “Phalanx” model as an operational answer: integrating cyber defence, intelligence, and engineering into one coordinated formation, with structured threat hunting designed to spot malicious behaviour that automated detection can miss.

The company says this approach has produced measurable operational outcomes, including containing low-complexity incidents in under 90 seconds, which it presents as a necessary benchmark in an environment where attackers are compressing dwell time and accelerating internal discovery.

Why it matters for boards and executives

The implication of esentry’s “five-day window” is governance-level, not just technical. If attackers can complete reconnaissance within a week, then delayed approvals, fragmented tooling, and unclear escalation paths become material risks. In that context, the report’s underlying message is that cyber resilience will increasingly be defined by how quickly organisations can detect, verify, and contain intrusions—not by the number of security products they own.