Advanced persistent threat detection and mitigation

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are complicated and well disguised malware infecting internal systems and have become the coin phrase of late, due to there being no better way to describe the capabilities of this more recently observed sophisticated malware. The anti-virus software companies have done a good job at eradicating the most common malware such as the "I Love You" virus and others. What has not been easy to eradicate are the malware types that use complicated zero-day vulnerabilities, multi-encoded malicious payloads, encryption, obfuscation, and clever masquerading techniques that are infecting networks at an all-time high.

The approach taken by APT mitigation solutions is providing a safe environment; usually virtualized instances or sandboxes of operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, are employed, where malicious software can run and infect the operating system. The tool then analyzes everything the malicious software...