Assessing the APT threat

摘要

Do security vendors secretly create the attacks their tools are designed to ward off? Of course not, but that old chestnut hints at a broader suspicion about whether the current state of security is really as bad as the security firms make it out to be, espe- cially when it comes to the latest poster child: advanced persistent threats. To ascertain just how real the APT threat is, the Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 244 security profes- sionals in companies with more than 1,000 employees. "When we started this project there was a fair amount of debate about APTs," says Jon Oltsik, a principal analyst at ESG and a Network World blogger. "Was this type of attack real and unique or were APTs nothing more than a marketing term to add an alarming label to pedestrian types of cyber attacks?"