Time, Costs and Solutions for Malware Attacks and APTs
As malware continues to evolve at lightning speed, it’s getting more and more difficult to prevent and identify its existence. A computer attack from the APT virus is both insidious and crippling for enterprises. Its lifecycle, if well-masked, can do some real damage in just 12 months. An Advanced Persistent Threat attack on a bank revealed that it’s a methodical attack. Here’s how it unfolded. Seasoned cybercriminals mined the bank’s social media platforms and website to identify its hosts and senior personnel. Stolen data was then used to launch phishing email campaigns and launched malware on the bank’s executives’ laptops. Undetected by antivirus software, the attack expanded throughout the business. All of this took just three months. Over the next several months, the malware had injected a code into all of the infected systems. Slowly, it stole passwords, security policies and network diagrams. The organized crime ring used this data for a more offensive attack across the company’s network. The last two months of the malware attack entailed downloading the bank card information of more than 50 million bank customers.
