Chapter 9: Complexities in Cybercrime - The Evolution of Attack

• Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)
• APT differs from regular attackers in that it is a common group of attackers, not just one hacker, which combine knowledge and abilities to carry out whatever exploit that will get them into the environment they seek.
• APT are focused and motivated to aggressively and successfully penetrate a network with variously different attack methods.
• This type of attack is coordinated by human involvement, rather then various types of threats that goes through automated steps to inject its payload.
• The APT has specific goals and is commonly highly organized and well funded, this makes it the biggest threat of all. 
• An APT is commonly custom-developed malicious code that is build specifically for its target, it has multiple ways of hiding itself once it infiltrates the environment, may be able to polymorph itself in replication capabilities, and has several different "anchors" so eradicating it is difficult if it is discovered. 
• The attacker put the code through barrage of tests against the most up-to-date detection applications on the market so APT infiltrations are usually very hard to detect with host-based solutions.