The global threat

States under threat of hostile agents.

Types of threat to cyber attack
Category	Nature	Actor	Description
Threat type 1	Strategic	State or parastate	Its target is critical infrastructures, defense systems and key industries. It is infrequent but it has occurred. It is also known as Cyber war.
Threat type 2	Obstructive	State, parastate and criminal	Cyber sabotage. Paralyses a running operation, sometimes occurs.
Threat type 3	Disruptive	Parastate and criminal	This is the most frequent and includes cyber espionage and APT (Advanced Persistent Threat).

The threats posed by cyber delinquency, cyber espionage or cyber sabotage increase by close to 15% each year on global scale. In 2015, the loot from cyber attacks was 1,000 million dollars stolen and 300 million documents that were stolen and used illegally. The United States authorities figure that hundreds of millions of dollars in value of intellectual property was stolen by criminal entities or Tech-Insiders.

Each year, more than 30 million malware applications are created that equally threaten private and public institutions (PandaLabs). In Spain alone, 1,460,000 cyber attacks occur each year (University Pontificia de Comillas), the majority of which are not even detected.

Western states as well as their production systems are under threat of hostile agents that operate in the cybernetic world. On a global scale, the level of threat is pinpointed in three types of attacks, according to our categorisation:

Solutions: First steps

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

The APT is based on a combination of elements that maximise the potential of the success of a cyber attack: analysis of open sources, surveillance, espionage, infiltration, cyber attack, exfiltration. AN APT that has been well executed works like a highly-sophisticated intelligence operation , with 5 clearly defined phases:

Recognition
Incursion
Discovery
Capture
Exfiltration

The APT combines human measures of conventional espionage, with IT resources so that purely technological security is not effective and the attacker includes social engineering actions and an advanced knowledge of languages. Often, businesses and organisations are attacked without being aware that their leading-edge technologies have been stolen and that they are losing their competitive advantage.

USA: 860 million $

France: 1200 million €

The awareness of such threat is growing in the occidental world. The United States have recently budgeted 860 million dollars to carry out a vulnerability assessment and to develop their own cyber-offensive systems. France has budgeted 1,200 million euros to improve their capabilities in the cybernetic world.

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The global threat

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

RedTeam CyberWarFare

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