What Makes a Threat Advanced?
An advanced threat is characterized by its ability to evade traditional security defenses, persist within a system, and adapt to countermeasures. These threats often use sophisticated techniques to bypass the security measures.
The following attack vectors lend threat actors higher rates of successful malware or attack deployment.
Zero Days
Software often contains security weaknesses that aren’t proactively discovered. Developers sometimes monitor for these vulnerabilities and work hard to release patches.
However, vulnerabilities can still slip through the net. A “zero-day” refers to a newly discovered vulnerability that cybercriminals can exploit before developers have a chance to issue a patch. The term zero-day signifies that the vendor or developer has just become aware of the flaw, leaving them with zero days to address it before an attack.
When zero-days are discovered, they offer attackers a new and completely-unprotected method of intrusion.
Phishing and Account Takeover
Software vulnerabilities aren’t the only intrusion technique attackers can leverage. Phishing can take advantage of employees’ and team members’ day-to-day workflows and let attackers execute account takeover attacks.
Phishing attacks vary in their range of grammatical skill and social engineering ability. Spear phishing usually represents the highest degree of phishing risk: this is a highly targeted type that focuses on a specific individual or organization.
The attacker often takes their time collecting relevant personal information, such as:
- Target’s job title
- Interests
- Social media activity
With vast amounts of personal data easily accessible online, cybercriminals can create highly customized and deceptive messages, increasing the likelihood of success. This type of phishing attack often aims to:
- Lead the victim toward handing over sensitive information
- Trick the employee into sending them money, in the case of fake invoices
Advanced Evasion Techniques (AETs)
Beyond these intrusion techniques, advanced attackers have also become adept at hiding their intrusion into, and movement around victims’ networks. Some advanced attacks combine several evasion methods that allow them to remain indistinguishable from normal network traffic.
The specific method of evasion depends on the attack:
- Within phishing, attackers have implemented anti-research techniques, like blocking each IP after it’s accessed a faux login page to fake the removal of the phishing site.
- For attackers reliant on malware, encrypting a piece of malware allows them to evade signature-based detection by anti-virus tools. The anti-virus can’t match any strings to its internal database, allowing the malware program to then run a decryption process just before execution.
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are prolonged, highly targeted cyberattacks carried out by skilled and persistent adversaries. These attacks are designed to remain undetected for long periods, enabling attackers to maintain access to a system without detection.
APTs typically rely on a roster of techniques that span the width of social engineering, custom-built malware, and long-term infiltration to sneak into networks and achieve their objectives. Because this demands intensive time and resources, the cyber intelligence community labels the more renowned groups of APTs to facilitate better tracking.
3 Types of Advanced Threat Protection
Because the breadth and severity of modern attacks are greater than ever, advanced threat protection methods need to identify and remove threats – without the risk of false positives.
The following capabilities cover three core forms of advanced threat protection.
#1. Sandboxing
A cybersecurity sandbox is a controlled physical or virtual environment designed to execute files or programs safely, segmented away from the system or device that it could cause harm to. Sandboxing allows security teams to analyze potentially malicious code before deploying it to critical systems.
In cybersecurity, sandboxing is used to assess whether software is “safe” or “unsafe” after testing.
Often, the code is executed within the sandbox while a machine learning algorithm or other artificial intelligence techniques analyze its behavior. If further evaluation is needed, the sample may be escalated for deeper analysis.
#2. Zero Trust Architecture
Zero Trust Architecture is a security framework that realizes the “never trust, always verify” concept.
It calls for careful identity verification for every device and user seeking access to a private network, removing any assumption of implicit trust. By using strict access controls, Zero Trust reduces the attack surface and limits the risk of lateral movement, even if an attacker manages to breach the network.
#3. Behavioral Analysis
Protecting an enterprise’s environment from advanced malware can’t depend on signature-based detection. The answer to this is machine learning’s ability to detect malicious behavior, rather than individual lines of code. Machine learning-based protection ingests the historical logs from an application and network to establish a baseline of normal interactions.
This way, when a piece of obfuscated malware begins to decrypt and run strings, the behavioral analysis shuts down the unprecedented action and sends an alert to the security team.
Implement Advanced Threat Prevention with Check Point
Check Point has remained at the cutting-edge of cybersecurity since the very first firewall in the 1990s. The Miercom report stress-tested Check Point’s Quantum threat prevention app, leveraging a host of advanced malware, phishing, and mutation attacks against the appliance.
Quantum was able to detect all instances of malware, including polymorphic strains that attempt to evade security devices by modifying attack methods. Malicious phishing techniques were levied against the appliance across both email and social media messages; even with Miercom’s proprietary engineering tactics, 90.7% of phishing URLs were successfully detected and blocked. Even while being protocol fuzzed, Check Point was able to detect almost all threats while maintaining high CPU efficiency.
Check Point Quantum delivers uncompromising performance via its security gateways and firewall capabilities. Manage the rules and AI keeping your networks, clouds, and IoT devices safe via a unified console.
Discover Check Point Quantum for yourself with a demo.
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