Advanced Persistent Threats

How to tell if the organisation you are dealing with is the victim of an ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’.  These are one of the hardest threats for an organisation to remove and can be extremely difficult to detect even when audited by an external body.  However, your security as a customer of these organisations is significantly impaired as fraudsters are more likely to know their internal procedures and how to exploit them and may have snippets of your personal details that they have access too.

These are threats that are embedded within organisations, often from a previous cyber-attack that could have been carried out years in the past.  The fraudsters understand they are better able to exploit the security vulnerability by remaining undetected over long periods of time.

The company may not have the powers to deal with the threat, the activity is likely to be highly malicious and illegal and compliance with employment laws will restrict the ability of the organisation to deal with the threat.

Within the organisation they will be looking for several indicators:

·         Late night logins

·         Increase in malware stored on computers

·         Data being transferred to single points

·         Large transfers of data externally

·         Usage of flash drives to carry data

·         Increase in spear phishing activity

However, these activities do not necessarily trigger examination from regulatory bodies, a company can have a robust policy framework in place but still have fundamentally malicious activity being carried out from within its system.

So, what to look out for as a customer:

·         Monitor chat forums such as mumsnet.com, thisismoney.co.uk, moneysavingexpert.com

·         An increase in phishing emails

·         An increase in smishing text messages

·         Beware of links in emails

·         Does the company publish a strong anti-fraud message?

·         Does the company act to inform you of what a fraudulent email looks like?

 In truth it is even harder to detect if the company you are dealing with has an ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’.  If the company you are dealing with cannot detect the shortcoming or regulatory bodies are unable to detect the threat, you as a customer are less likely to know.  What is important is that people should be wary of the threat, and take any communication received with some caution.