What is Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)?: The Definitive Guide

In today’s constantly evolving threat landscape, traditional security measures no longer suffice for protecting against sophisticated cyber threats. That’s where Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) comes in— a comprehensive security solution that goes beyond basic defenses to detect and respond to even the most advanced and elusive threats.

If you’re rolling your eyes at another addition to the acronym overload in cybersecurity solutions, fret not; you won’t be just adding another entry to your cybersecurity glossary. This article provides a definitive guide that goes in-depth to help you thoroughly understand advanced threat protection and why your business likely needs it. 

Basic vs Advanced Cyber Threats 

The first point worth clarifying is what actually constitutes an advanced threat. And, why exactly might you need a specific type of security tool to deal with those threats?

When you think of an advanced threat, you might instinctively use words such as sophisticated or technical. While these adjectives are accurate to a degree, basic threats can also be quite technical. Some advanced threats aren’t actually that technical, but they are hard to detect.  

What really differentiates basic and advanced threats is that advanced threats are malicious acts that exploit unknown vulnerabilities and weaknesses. 

Since advanced threats evade traditional signature-based and endpoint security defenses, stealthiness and evasiveness are crucial characteristics that define them. Other common traits of advanced threats are that they’re flexible to adapt to changing circumstances and that they’re often highly targeted. 

Here are a few examples of advanced threats:

• A zero-day exploit that targets a vulnerability for which no security patch exists. 
• Polymorphic malware that continuously changes to evade detection.
• Advanced persistent threats that combine multiple attack vectors, enabling an outsider to gain and persist with unauthorized access in a network for a long period of time. 
• Malicious user activity inside your network, which could stem from a disgruntled insider or an account takeover attack.

Sophisticated analytic tools are necessary to combat advanced threats. ATP solutions fit the bill by enabling swift identification, examination, contextualization, and reaction to the behaviors and content of malevolent network traffic. These tools can prove extremely valuable for faster reaction times in a world where intruders lurk undetected in networks for an average of 51 days in organizations of up to 250 employees. 

How Does Advanced Threat Protection Work? 

Advanced Threat Protection solutions are designed to detect and analyze suspicious traffic, files, and malware using advanced techniques such as multi-layer hardware emulation, multiple sandboxes, and both supervised and unsupervised machine learning models. The main objective of ATP solutions is to identify and neutralize threats before they can cause any harm, and to respond rapidly in the event of a security breach. 

These solutions strive to provide the most accurate and comprehensive insights into the most difficult-to-detect threats. Deployment models vary between vendors, and they include hardware appliances, software solutions, or cloud-based services. 

ATP: Key Features 

Here are three key features that ATP solutions bring to the table. 

• Real-time visibility—while running scheduled network traffic and endpoint scans helps detect basic threats, it doesn’t suffice for advanced threats. ATP solutions provide real-time visibility by monitoring traffic and endpoints all the time, using machine learning and behavioral analysis to identify anomalies. 
• Sophisticated security analytics—advanced threats can even evade the virtual sandbox environments that companies deploy to uncover hidden malware. ATP provides sophisticated security analytics with a range of techniques, including advanced heuristics, multi-layer file analysis / multiple sandboxes, examining encrypted traffic, and visual data representations. 
• Rich threat intelligence—ATP solutions should also leverage rich sources of threat intelligence to help better gauge if network traffic is associated with known-bad

URLs, IP addresses, files, and e-mail addresses. This threat intelligence can help catch advanced threats from account takeover attacks in which hackers successfully get access to user accounts. 

The features of ATP solutions work together to help achieve earlier detection of advanced threats and adequate protection against their worst impacts. Contextual awareness ensures security teams can better respond to threats rather than being overwhelmed by a barrage of information. 

Best Practices for Advanced Threat Protection

A tool is only as good as the strategy and security practices that accompany its use. Here are some best practices that can bolster the strength of advanced threat protection:

• Think of defense in depth: a combination of ATP tools and other investments in cybersecurity (e.g. zero trust, employee training and awareness) gives you the best protection against more advanced threats. 
• Watch out for diversions: a sudden uptick in more easily detectable threats can actually be a sign of a diversionary tactic used to take attention away from a more advanced threat. Hackers often use DDoS or basic known malware attacks as diversionary tactics, so it’s useful to bear this in mind. 
• Take a proactive approach: The sophisticated features of ATP tools can increase the proclivity to take a “sit and wait” approach to security. But it’s best for analysts to take a proactive stance and actively look for signs of advanced threats rather than wait for an alert or other red flag to pop up on their screens.
• Don’t neglect your attack surface: part of the reason that threats are getting more difficult to detect is down to unmanaged attack surfaces. As companies continue to expand their IT ecosystems into the cloud and use virtualization, there are more potential points of entry than ever. Neglecting to monitor and reduce your attack surface where possible is a recipe for getting successfully targeted by an advanced threat. 

Protect and Mitigate External Exposure that APT’s could Leverage with Flare

In recent years, there’s no doubt that threat actors have improved at carrying out more impactful cyber attacks that come with increasingly costly consequences. Much of this advancement stems from the use of more targeted attacks and better availability of previously unknown exploits. ATP solutions aim to prevent advanced threats far better than the traditional security tools that they often evade.

But, the other side of the story is that advanced threats also succeed more due to ongoing IT infrastructure shifts, including hybrid workforces and cloud-based services. Hackers get an information advantage when companies don’t detect and remediate high-risk external exposure across the dark and clear web. This exposure allows hackers to gain a foothold in your network through compromised credentials for sale or previously leaked on underground forums and Telegram channels.

Flare provides a proactive dark web monitoring service that lets your company monitor, identify, contextualize, and prioritize dark web threats. When hackers have fewer points of entry to target, advanced attacks are less likely to succeed. 

Learn more with a free trial here.