Cyber Security Trends: Advanced Persistent Threats

Many coordinated cyber-attacks had occurred around the world over the past two weeks which demands organisations to review their readiness to protect from advanced persistent threats (APT). APT uses continuous, stealthy, and sophisticated hacking techniques to gain access to a system and remain inside for a prolonged period of time, with potentially destructive consequences. Many Global payments companies and Money transfer companies were targeted but New Zealand’s Stock Exchange Market (NZX) was among the hardest hit as they suffered cyber-attacks for days together in a row. It was a barrage of Distributed Denial of service attacks (DDoS) affecting NZX’s servers’ availability. DDoS attacks are intended to disrupt a network by flooding it with internet traffic, thus overwhelming its capacity to handle legitimate requests.  Traffic was originating “through the global gateway” and the government said it was impossible to identify the source. It is also feared that this may only be a rehearsal for a major attack targeting financial institutions amid the issues going on in the global stock markets. NXSecure, the cyber vertical of 10xDS, is closely watching the trends to bring to you a combination of multiple measures, ranging from sophisticated security solutions to a workforce that is trained to identify any attacks, for building successful and ongoing defence strategies.