Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) Explained

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) represent some of the most dangerous and sophisticated cyberattacks facing organizations today. Unlike opportunistic cybercrime that relies on mass phishing campaigns or commodity malware, APTs are highly targeted, carefully planned, and designed to remain undetected for long periods of time.

As threat actors grow more patient, well-funded, and strategic, the risk is no longer limited to large enterprises or government agencies. Mid-sized organizations and their IT and cybersecurity services partners are increasingly in the crosshairs. For businesses of any size, understanding what APTs are, why they happen, and how attackers operate is a critical first step toward building effective cyber resilience.

What is an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)?

An Advanced Persistent Threat is a prolonged, targeted cyberattack in which an attacker gains unauthorized access to a network and maintains that access over time. The goal is rarely quick disruption or fast financial gain. Instead, APTs focus on long-term objectives such as espionage, data theft, intellectual property exfiltration, surveillance, or strategic positioning inside a victim’s environment.

While APT campaigns vary widely, they tend to share a few defining characteristics:

• Highly targeted rather than broad, opportunistic attacks
• Long dwell time, with attackers remaining undetected for extended periods
• Custom or adaptive tooling that evolves as defenses change
• Clear strategic objectives, such as espionage, long-term access, or high-impact extortion

The “advanced” aspect refers to the techniques used: custom malware, zero-day vulnerabilities, living-off-the-land tactics, and carefully crafted social engineering.  

Persistent” reflects the attacker’s intent to maintain access for weeks, months, or even years, adapting their methods as defenses evolve.

Unlike smash-and-grab attacks, APT campaigns often unfold slowly and quietly, making them difficult to detect without continuous monitoring and correlation across endpoints, networks, identities, and cloud workloads.

Why Do APT Attacks Happen? Common Motivations

APTs are driven by objectives that extend beyond simple financial crime. While some financially motivated groups now employ APT-style tactics, many campaigns are rooted in strategic or long-term gain.

One common motivation is espionage. Attackers may seek sensitive business information, trade secrets, research and development data, or confidential communications. This type of activity is especially prevalent in highly competitive industries and geopolitically sensitive sectors.

Another motivation is long-term financial gain. Rather than deploying ransomware immediately, attackers may spend months mapping a network, identifying high-value systems, and positioning themselves for maximum impact. This approach can lead to larger ransom demands, more damaging extortion, or repeated monetization of the same victim.

APTs are also used to enable future attacks. By establishing persistence within one organization, threat actors can pivot into partners, customers, or suppliers. This makes APTs particularly dangerous in interconnected environments and supply chains.

Finally, some APT campaigns are motivated by disruption or influence. These operations may aim to undermine trust, damage reputations, or interfere with operations during critical business periods.

How APT Attacks Work: Tactics and Actions

While every APT campaign is different, most follow a recognizable pattern that aligns with the broader cyber kill chain:

• Initial access through targeted phishing, credential abuse, or exposed services
• Establishing persistence within systems and identities
• Lateral movement to expand access and identify high-value assets
• Long-term reconnaissance and data collection
• Execution of the final objective, such as exfiltration, disruption, or extortion

Initial access often begins with highly targeted phishing, credential theft, exploitation of exposed services, or abuse of trusted third-party relationships. Rather than sending thousands of generic phishing emails, attackers research specific individuals and craft believable lures tailored to their roles.

Once inside the environment, attackers focus on establishing persistence. This may involve creating hidden accounts, deploying backdoors, abusing legitimate remote management tools, or embedding themselves in scheduled tasks and services that survive reboots and password changes.

Privilege escalation and lateral movement follow as attackers expand their foothold. They harvest credentials, exploit misconfigurations, and move between systems to map the environment and identify high-value assets.

During the dwell time phase, attackers blend into normal activity. They use legitimate administrative tools, encrypted communications, and low-and-slow techniques to avoid triggering alerts. This is often where the most damage is done, as sensitive data is quietly exfiltrated, or systems are staged for future disruption.

Finally, the attacker executes their end goal. This may involve data theft, ransomware deployment, sabotage, extortion, or coordinated disruption across multiple systems. In many cases, organizations only realize they were victims after this final stage—sometimes months after the initial compromise.

Real-World APT Examples

Often, the term APT is used in conjunction with nation-state actors, but can also describe groups conducting large-scale, targeted operations with specific goals. Through that lens, here are some of the APT groups plaguing today’s organizations:

Akira Ransomware Group

While commonly discussed in the context of ransomware, the Akira group demonstrates many APT-style behaviors, including targeted intrusion, extended reconnaissance within victim environments, and deliberate staging before deploying ransomware and data exfiltration tactics. This reflects a broader trend in which financially motivated threat actors adopt APT tradecraft to increase leverage and impact.

This makes Akira a useful example of how modern APT-style campaigns blur the line between traditional cybercrime and long-term strategic intrusion.

Learn more about Akira in our breakdown of their operation, including their behaviors, tactics, and repeated patterns.

LAPSUS$

The LAPSUS$ group is known for high profile intrusions driven primarily by social engineering rather than custom malware. Their campaigns have leveraged techniques like phishing, MFA fatigue, and identity abuse to gain initial access, followed by rapid privilege escalation and lateral movement to reach sensitive systems. This makes LAPSUS$ a strong example of how modern APT style operations increasingly target people and identity workflows as the most efficient path into otherwise well defended environments, as seen in their campaigns involving Okta and other major platforms.

Find more information about the LASUS$ Okta campaign and how to detect their activity on our blog.

Lazarus Group

The Lazarus Group is widely associated with long running cyber campaigns that blend espionage with financial motivation. Their compromise of 3CX software demonstrated how supply chain attacks can be used to gain broad, downstream access to otherwise well secured environments. By tampering with trusted software updates, Lazarus was able to quietly distribute malware to organizations at scale, reinforcing how APT actors increasingly target vendors and platforms as force multipliers rather than attacking individual companies one by one.

Read our coverage of the Lazarus 3CX attack as one of the first groups to uncover it.

Why APTs Are So Hard to Detect

What makes APTs especially dangerous is not just their sophistication, but their patience. Attackers deliberately avoid noisy techniques that would trigger traditional security alerts. They often rely on legitimate system tools, trusted user credentials, and encrypted traffic that blends into normal activity.

Point-in-time security controls struggle to identify these campaigns because no single event looks overtly malicious. Detection typically requires correlating small, low-confidence signals across endpoints, identity systems, network traffic, cloud services, and logs over extended periods of time.

Without continuous monitoring and active threat hunting, organizations may unknowingly provide attackers with months of unrestricted access.

How Organizations Can Defend Against APTs

Defending against APTs is less about individual point solutions and more about layered visibility, continuous monitoring, and rapid response. Organizations need the ability to detect early-stage intrusion attempts, identify unusual behavior over time, and respond quickly when subtle indicators begin to form a larger pattern.

Strong identity security, hardened endpoints, proper network segmentation, and disciplined patch management all reduce the attack surface. Equally important is having centralized visibility into security telemetry and the operational capability to investigate and respond to threats before they escalate.

Because APT campaigns unfold over time, organizations that rely solely on alert-based security often miss the early signals. Continuous detection and response, paired with threat intelligence and proactive hunting, is essential for surfacing the slow-burn behaviors that define APT activity.

APTs are a Strategic Risk, Not Just a Technical One

Advanced Persistent Threats represent a strategic threat to business operations, intellectual property, and long-term resilience. As attackers become more methodical and patient, organizations must evolve from reactive security models to approaches that assume breach and focus on visibility, detection, and response across the full attack lifecycle.

Understanding how APTs operate is the foundation. Building the capability to identify and stop them before meaningful damage occurs is what separates resilient organizations from those that become case studies.

Learn more about the potential of APT-led attacks in our Threat Research catalogue.

If you are interested in a more holistic, continuous, and wide-reaching approach to security, contact us. We would love to connect with you.