Defending against advanced persistent threat: a risk management perspective

Advanced persistent threat (APT) as a new form of cyber attack has posed a severe threat to modern organizations. When an APT has been detected, the target organization has to develop a response resource allocation strategy to mitigate her potential loss. This paper suggests a risk management approach to solving this APT response problem. First, we present three state evolution models. Thereby we assess the organization’s potential loss. On this basis, we propose two kinds of game-theoretic models of the APT response problem. This work initiates the study of the APT response problem.