There has been a global increase in disruptive and destructive cyber attacks in critical sectors carried out by advanced adversaries known as advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, as confirmed by Intel 471’s latest intelligence update.

This surge in activity highlights a dangerous shift in the cyber threat landscape. While hackers with limited capabilities continue small-scale activities, advanced adversaries are dominating headlines. Cyber attacks driven by espionage and operational disruption are growing in scale, sophistication, and impact.

As organizations expand their digital footprints, rely heavily on complex supply chains, and operate under increasingly interconnected federal and global regulations, the risk—and potential fallout—of APT attacks continues to rise.

This guide breaks down what advanced persistent threats are, analyzes real-world examples from late 2025, and details practical steps your organization can take to strengthen detection and prevention to mitigate risks to your data, operations, and mission.

What is an advanced persistent threat?

An advanced persistent threat (APT) is a long-term pattern of targeted, sophisticated attacks in which an adversary uses multiple attack vectors to gain unauthorized access to the target organization’s IT infrastructure and remain undetected for an extended period. Their objective isn’t typically a quick ransomware payout—it’s to disrupt operations, gain intelligence, and position themselves for future sabotage.

Putting the “persistent” in APT, this adversary pursues objectives repeatedly over an extended period of time, adapting to defenders’ efforts to resist them. This evasion enables them to maintain a long-term or permanent foothold in order to achieve its objectives, based on the definition in NIST 800-39.

Advanced persistent threat groups​ and actors​

APT groups are often backed by nation-states, terrorist groups, or large criminal enterprises. They possess the skills, discipline, and financial resources to launch campaigns involving highly sophisticated tactics that evade traditional security controls.

These are not opportunistic cybercriminals exploiting easy gaps for quick cash. APT actors are patient, well-resourced, and strategically motivated. They infiltrate networks quietly, maintain access for months or years, and undermine the organization’s mission while avoiding detection.

Common motivations of these groups are: 

• Cyber-espionage
• Intellectual property theft
• Influence (ie. manipulating public opinion or political outcomes)
• Operational disruption, particularly of critical infrastructure
• Other strategic, geopolitical, or military objectives

Advanced persistent threat characteristics​

While not all APTs are the same, they share hallmark characteristics:

• Highly sensitive targets: Focus on Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), critical programs, or high-value assets.
• Advanced techniques: Use of living-off-the-land (LOTL) tools, stealthy lateral movement, and multi-stage infection chains
• Persistence: Long-term or permanent footholds maintained through backdoors, custom malware, and privilege escalation
• Targeted focus: Repeated attacks aimed at specific organizations, particularly in critical infrastructure and government sectors
• High stealth: Designed to evade security solutions that currently dominate the commercial marketplace
• Large-scale impact: Its objectives of data exfiltration, surveillance, and/or operational disruption designed for large-scale impact on national or global security and economy

Advanced persistent threat lifecycle​

Since the goal of an APT group is to remain undetected as long as possible in order to do as much damage as possible, the lifecycle of an APT is much longer than other types of attacks and typically includes the following phases:

Stage 1: Reconnaissance

This is the intelligence-gathering phase. APT actors take their time collecting extensive information about the target to increase their success rate once the operation begins. They may study the organization’s technology stack or research key employees, for example.

APT groups may spend weeks or months in this phase, ensuring they understand exactly how to infiltrate the target and how to remain undetected afterward.

Stage 2: Initial Compromise

Once the attacker has gathered enough intelligence, they attempt to gain their first point of access. The goal in this phase is not necessarily deep penetration—it’s obtaining a reliable foothold inside the network without triggering alerts. One way of doing so is by sending spear-phishing emails tailored to employees, for example.

Stage 3: Establishing a foothold

After gaining access, attackers work quickly to ensure they can maintain persistence even if the initial vulnerability is discovered or closed. This might involve installing remote access tools (RATs) or backdoors, or creating rogue user accounts.

At this stage, the attacker is laying down infrastructure within the victim’s environment to guarantee repeated access.

Stage 4: Extending their foothold

Once this foothold is established, the adversary focuses on extending it to increase their access or control across the environment. This stage includes both:

• Privilege escalation: Elevating their permissions to gain administrative or domain-level rights
• Lateral movement: Moving throughout the network to map assets and identify systems that hold high-value data

This stage may continue for months while the attacker builds the access they need to achieve their objectives.

Stage 5: Objective

With full access and deep familiarity with the network, the attacker begins working toward their objectives, which could be any combination of the following:

• Data exfiltration: Stealing sensitive files, CUI, intellectual property, or credentials
• Long-term espionage: Monitoring internal communications or observing operations
• Operational disruption: Dropping destructive malware or modifying critical systems
• Supply chain infiltration: Using the victim as a stepping stone to additional targets

Stage 6: Evasion

Throughout the entire operation but especially after achieving an objective, attackers actively work to hide their presence by clearing logs, disabling or bypassing monitoring tools, or modifying system configurations.

These evasion tactics help attackers maintain access for long periods—sometimes years—and complicate incident response once the intrusion is discovered.

By understanding these stages, organizations can better design defense-in-depth strategies that interrupt APT activities early in the attack cycle.

How to Stop Advanced Persistent Threats: Detection & Prevention

While APTs are extremely sophisticated, organizations can significantly reduce their risk by improving both advanced persistent threat detection and advanced persistent threat prevention. The following strategies provide a strong baseline.

1. Implement APT-focused cybersecurity frameworks

Frameworks like NIST 800-172, CMMC Level 3, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) were built expressly to safeguard information systems against advanced persistent threats.

These frameworks require security capabilities such as:

• Robust identity and access control
• Enhanced encryption, particularly for sensitive data
• Advanced audit and logging with integrity protections
• Continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and behavioral analytics
• Zero-trust principles and rigorous segmentation
• Threat hunting and proactive detection of stealthy adversaries

NIST 800-172 in particular includes Enhanced Security Requirements designed specifically for countering APT attacks, making it one of the strongest blueprints for protecting high-value assets like controlled unclassified information (CUI) and export controlled information (ECI).

Organizations that adopt these frameworks—and continuously validate their controls—are far better positioned to detect and respond to APTs early in the attack lifecycle.

The steps below are just a few examples of the guidance and requirements from these frameworks.

2. Build architectural redundancy for resilience during attacks

Because APTs often maintain a foothold in an environment for weeks or months, organizations should assume that compromise is possible and design their systems to remain operational during an attack.

Effective redundancy strategies include:

• Failover systems: Automatically activate when components are compromised.
• Segmentation: Limit the "blast radius" so an attacker cannot move easily from a compromised email server to critical databases.
• Isolated backups: Ensure backups are hardened against lateral movement so data can be restored without reinfection.

This capability is essential as part of an APT risk-response strategy. Many federal and defense frameworks—including NIST 800-172—explicitly require architectural approaches that can withstand, not just resist, attacks.

3. Implement continuous monitoring and behavioral analytics

APT actors are experts at blending into normal network activity. Signature-based detection tools often fail to catch them.

Continuous monitoring combined with behavioral analytics helps organizations detect:

• Privilege escalation
• Lateral movement
• Suspicious authentication patterns
• High-risk configuration drift
• Slow, covert data exfiltration

By aggregating log data across endpoints, cloud services, identities, and infrastructure, organizations can surface anomalies that would otherwise remain hidden.

4. Strengthen identity and access controls

Because many APT campaigns rely on compromised credentials rather than malware, access control is one of the most impactful security layers.

Organizations should prioritize:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users
• Regular user access reviews 
• Privileged access management (PAM) for high-risk accounts
• Credential rotation and protection of secrets
• Continuous monitoring of privileged activity

By limiting the number of accounts an attacker can compromise, organizations reduce the speed and severity of APT lateral movement.

5. Conduct continuous compliance assessments and vendor risk evaluations

For organizations dealing with advanced persistent threats, the risk posed by external partners (especially suppliers in the supply chain) may become more pronounced, according to NIST 800-39.

APT groups increasingly exploit vulnerabilities in supply chains—particularly the software supply chain—because a vendor with weak controls is often a more convenient entry point than the target organization.

To mitigate supply chain risk, organizations should:

• Conduct ongoing vendor assessments—not just security questionnaires during procurement
• Require suppliers to follow cybersecurity frameworks like CMMC, NIST 800-171, ISO 27001, or NIS2
• Monitor third-party security and compliance posture throughout the year, not just annually
• Manage and monitor vendor access to ensure they can access necessary systems securely and efficiently

Supply chain security is now as important as internal cybersecurity, especially for federal contractors and regulated industries. Vendor compliance should be treated as an ongoing discipline—not a once-a-year audit event.

How Secureframe helps prevent and detect APT attacks

Combatting APTs requires more than isolated tools—it requires unified visibility, strong security controls, and continuous compliance across your entire environment and supply chain.

Secureframe makes this possible by helping organizations:

• Automate compliance with APT-focused frameworks including CMMC, NIST 800-171, NIST CSF, and dozens more
• Map and validate controls across frameworks that are designed to counter advanced persistent threats
• Automate continuous monitoring across systems, identities, cloud infrastructure, and endpoints and detect configuration drift and potential vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them
• Simplify vendor risk management, ensuring third parties uphold the same level of security
• Automate the assignment and tracking of security awareness training to reduce the success rate of spear-phishing attempts and other common initial compromise methods for APT attacks

With Secureframe, organizations strengthen their defenses against advanced persistent threats while meeting stringent regulatory requirements and protecting sensitive data across their full attack surface. Request a demo to learn more.