Advanced persistent threats affect small and medium-sized businesses of all kinds.

Though many small business owners wonder why those running these campaigns would even care about their companies, the cybersecurity services detecting and analyzing these attacks find the reason to be quite significant.

Advanced persistent threat companies warn that before assuming a small business is too insignificant to be noticed, owners must understand why they are the perfect target and take steps to avoid it.

What Is An Advanced Persistent Threat?

Advanced persistent threats or APTs are hacking campaigns run by well-funded, often state-sponsored hackers seeking to gain information through their activities.

APT services identify these campaigns as stealth attacks that typically use multi-faceted techniques to target infrastructure, large corporations, government entities, and others.

They are different than most other cyberattacks in that they are planned to allow actors to gain long-term access to systems that they can use for information gathering and other spying.

What Techniques Do APT Groups Use?

APT companies understand that the main motive and goal of these hacker groups is to gather information over a long time, as opposed to financial gain.

In fact, many of them are paid by the nation-states that they serve, making financial gain a low priority, although it does happen.

Based on these goals, advanced persistent threats are known to be carried out using specific techniques that can gain them the network access they require to spy in the background while gathering intelligence information.

Some of those techniques include spear-phishing and social engineering attacks to gain access to networks and supply chains, exploitation of software and hardware through executable programs downloaded onto the network, and stealth techniques of stealing data by copying and encrypting it, then uploading data packets back to their networks.

Why Are Small Businesses The Perfect Target for APT Groups?

Although APT groups seek important information from large and important entities as mentioned above, APT services have identified a significant link between these groups and small businesses.

Small businesses make the perfect backdoor entry for ATP groups seeking access to larger entities.

Smaller companies connected to supply chains and business that serve larger entities and are often more easily targeted due to insufficient cybersecurity protection can easily be exploited by these hacker groups without the smaller enterprise ever knowing it.

APT companies have even learned that 93% of small business executives interviewed about these threats even believe companies like theirs are being unknowingly targeted by APT groups and used as stepping stones to access the networks of larger, more important entities.

Ultimately, preventing this activity and blocking these backdoors requires small businesses to employ cybersecurity tools and techniques that can better prevent access to their own networks as well as detect the presence of these groups should access be gained somehow.

Protect Networks From Targeting With An Experienced APT Service

Cybersecurity gets more challenging every year, especially for small businesses.

With the rise of advanced persistent threats using smaller companies as access points to larger networks, the need for better small business network security has never been greater.

An experienced advanced persistent threats company can help businesses implement the security features they need to protect themselves and other suppliers or customers they do business with from these stealthy, dangerous threats.