Biblio

The term “Advanced Persistent Threat” refers to a well-organized, malicious group of people who launch stealthy attacks against computer systems of specific targets, such as governments, companies or military. The attacks themselves are long-lasting, difficult to expose and often use very advanced hacking techniques. Since they are advanced in nature, prolonged and persistent, the organizations behind them have to possess a high level of knowledge, advanced tools and competent personnel to execute them. The attacks are usually preformed in several phases - reconnaissance, preparation, execution, gaining access, information gathering and connection maintenance. In each of the phases attacks can be detected with different probabilities. There are several ways to increase the level of security of an organization in order to counter these incidents. First and foremost, it is necessary to educate users and system administrators on different attack vectors and provide them with knowledge and protection so that the attacks are unsuccessful. Second, implement strict security policies. That includes access control and restrictions (to information or network), protecting information by encrypting it and installing latest security upgrades. Finally, it is possible to use software IDS tools to detect such anomalies (e.g. Snort, OSSEC, Sguil).

Security analysts implement various security mechanisms to protect systems from attackers. Even though these mechanisms try to secure systems, a talented attacker may use these same techniques to launch a sophisticated attack. This paper discuss about such an attack called as user account Denial of Service (DoS) where an attacker uses user account lockout features of the application to lockout all user accounts causing an enterprise wide DoS. The attack has being simulated usingastealthy attack mechanism called as Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) using a XMPP based botnet. Through the simulation, researchers discuss about the patterns associated with the attack which can be used to detect the attack in real time and how the attack can be prevented from the perspective of developers, system engineers and security analysts.

This paper presents a model to evaluate and select security countermeasures from a pool of candidates. The model performs industrial evaluation and simulations of the financial and technical impact associated to security countermeasures. The financial impact approach uses the Return On Response Investment (RORI) index to compare the expected impact of the attack when no response is enacted against the impact after applying security countermeasures. The technical impact approach evaluates the protection level against a threat, in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We provide a use case on malware attacks that shows the applicability of our model in selecting the best countermeasure against an Advanced Persistent Threat.