Cyber-attacks once were mainly the concern of governments, large corporations and other highly visible networks. Not anymore. The financial rewards generated from the theft of credit card information and other sensitive data gave rise to a new breed of malware, the polymorphic threat, and with it, the amount of malware has skyrocketed.
Most of today's malware is polymorphic and highly adept at changing its identity to evade standard, signature-based security platforms. Alone, these platforms will not recognize many of these threats. Advanced persistent threats, or APTs, increase the threat level by employing sophisticated evasion capabilities to get payloads past a network's defenses where they persist, undetected. APTs are targeted to an organization or a specific technology and often leverage zero day vulnerabilities - flaws for which no patch is available and no signature has been written. Any organization can become a victim.