Advanced Persistent Threats in depth

Question 1

What is an Advanced Persistent Threat ?

Answer 1

An Advanced Persistent Threat is the actual act of extracting information from a given system w/out the administrator’s/owner’s knowledge.

Question 2

What are the steps that generally must be performed ?

And how many steps are there

Answer 2

1st step: Create a breach in the system to break in.
2nd step: Exploit the inner system vulnerabilities.
3rd step: Through exploitation, you take control of the system (or segments of the system).
4th step: Data exfiltration. (the act of taking the data from the system and transferring it somewhere else).

Data exfiltration is generally the primary purpose of this attack.