For those readers of the Certified Ethical Hacker blog here that don’t yet know what Advanced Persistent Threat is, you are officially introduced via the recent Booz Allen Hamilton hacking. Advanced Persistent Threat is the emerging buzz-word in the hacking industry and Booz Allen Hamilton was one of the early adopters of combating and protecting clients against this concept. Ironically, it appears as though Advanced Persistent Threat was the cause for BAH’s hacking breach the other day.

Advanced Persistent Threat essentially means that an agency, typically with an espionage mission structure and in most cases a Government or mafia-like entity, targets a business or other Government unit and attempts to penetrate that unit using all hacking approaches necessary. So in other words, that stuff we learned in the CEH training class about the different security sources of compromise, application layer, network layer, social engineering etc. are all attacked with advanced methods for a consistent period of time.

Booz Allen Hamilton employee training consists of Advanced Persistent Threat techniques so that employees know where to find vulnerabilities.  The main problem is, there are hackers that are better and that are consistently progressing. If employees are trained in baseline penetration testing and then expected to harden a complex network, the malicious entity, in this case likely a (very large) country’s Government, has people with higher level training, perhaps in things like advanced exploit development or advanced wireless network hacking, and so they eventually get to their data.

High level hacking training is hard to find, only a few (ie Advanced Security) do it very well. Why? Because not many companies have the experienced minds behind their classes. The old saying, if you want to beat the hackers then you have to think like an attacker is true in this case, but the hackers may have been better trained.