What is an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack and what are the best protections against it?
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a security threat from a committed adversary with advanced level of competence, skill and substantial resources, allowing it to stage sophisticated cyber attacks and further create opportunities to fulfill its goals by employing various attack vectors, such as cyber, physical or deception techniques.
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is one of the most sophisticated security threats organizations face. Because these threats require expertise and resources to uncover. Besides APTs are sponsored by nation states and resourceful notorious criminals. What makes APTs more difficult than other cyberattacks is that it employs multiple attack vectors and stays for extended period of time without being detected.
APTs target organizations to evade their security controls and continuously exfiltrate data, steal proprietary products, spy on governments and militaries and so on.
The best protections against APT attacks would be to apply defense-in-depth principle, threat intelligence services, IDS/IPS, firewalls, anti-malwares, conducting security awareness training, and so on.