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Speaking at the InfoSecurity exhibition this week, Cassidian incident responder Matt Bennett said that the dangers of APT are increasing and that as many as one in five enterprises across the world have been affected.

He described targeted cyber attacks as an epidemic and revealed that such attacks hit businesses once every three minutes.

he referred to a number of recently reported attacks that have made the headlines including the fact taht email accounts of senior US officials were targeted in a Chinese hack attack and that the Chinese military was linked to an extensive cyber espionage campaign.
He also spoke about the fact that speculation rises that another US military contractor has been hit by hackers.

Advanced Persistent Threats are often considered to be the most dangerous and paradoxically the most discreet and they take advantage of the various weaknesses inherent in a large information system.

Attacks are often complex with more than 50 malwares being used. They are targeted, highly organised and discreet. The average time before discovery is often more than 400 days.

In the majority of cases the first step of an APT attack involves sending infected emails to a selection of people within an organisation. When one of the addresses opens the attachment, the malware is introduced into the network. The deployment of a very efficient but malicious mechanics starts to benefit external attackers.

Cassidian works with organisations to analyse the work station, network activity and carry out forensic investigation into past activity.

Cassidian has been selected by CESG the information assurance arm of GCHQ as one of four commecial cyber security organisations to work with the National Authorities in the Cyber Incident Response Pilot that was launched in November 2012. The pilot will be developed to allow organisations to be certified by the UK National Authority to work on belonging to government and critical UK industries.