Author: Michael Morris

By Michael Morris, Director of Global Business Development, Endace

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are the new battlefront for cybersecurity as threat actors combine multiple malware infiltration techniques to gain the most intelligence, cause the most damage, and ultimately reap the most financial rewards.  APT’s are the most sophisticated of threats, often difficult to detect and potentially lurking in your infrastructure for months or years before the real attack. Their motivations are political or financial, with a goal of maximum impact.

SecOps teams that are continually inundated with alerts and alarms don’t have time to connect the dots to realize some alarms point to APTs that are gaining a foothold. The sooner an APT can be identified and contained, the better the chance of minimizing the financial loss or brand damage your company experiences as a result.  This is easier said than done because skilled bad actors are constantly trying to cover their tracks, mask their existence, and hide the level of access they have gained and data they have collected.

Three pillars are key to effectively finding, containing, and mitigating APTs.  The first pillar is having visibility into everything that’s happening on your network. Getting the right network traffic to the right tools, including safely decrypting any TLS traffic, is critical for full visibility into threatening activity on the network. Other functions, such as deduplication, application filtering, and load-balancing traffic to multiple tools, are also important for an effective security stack.

The second pillar is implementing AI-based security analytics across all security-related telemetry data including Network, Endpoint, Application and Security logs. Bringing all this data together in one place enables the organization to create “baselines” of what is “normal behavior” versus “suspicious activity”. Leading analytics platforms can provide a single, correlated view of threatening activity and leverage integrations with third-party tools that accelerate the incident response process for SecOps teams.

The third pillar is recording enterprise-wide network history for in-depth investigations during incident response.  Many APTs implement wipers to erase evidence of their existence and cover their tracks, including modifying system logs, authentication records and other sources of evidence. However, bad actors can’t hide when enterprises implement continuous network traffic recording.  Recorded network history lets you see exactly what’s happening on the network so you can investigate and defend against even the most well-masked security threats. It provides tamper-proof evidence that lets teams understand the full extent of a threat including the ability to see into payloads that may have been collected and exfiltrated.

Join us on the webinar on July 21st to hear more. Register here.