APT: Should your panties be in a bunch, and how do you un-bunch them?
Summary: Cisco Talos argues that the term APT has been co-opted by marketers to mean any malware, rootkit or bot, when it originally described nation-state-linked groups that penetrated critical infrastructure and built multi-level footholds. The piece says APT is a level of threat defined by targeted attacks combining exploits and social engineering, custom bots, and attackers who monitor their channels and reinfect cleaned nodes from other machines.
What you should know: Talos cites a turnaround from patch diff to proof-of-concept of about an hour for one researcher, and from fuzzer hit to exploit in roughly 10 minutes for the JBIG2 bug, which sets the disclosure-to-exploit window defenders are working against. It also warns that even organizations with nothing worth stealing can serve as a jumping-off point, since attackers want the network itself.
Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗
- Topics
- OT / ICS & Critical Infrastructure
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