A comprehensive study on APT attacks and countermeasures for future networks and communications: challenges and solutions

Recently in the connected digital world, targeted attack has become one of the most serious threats to conventional computing systems. Advanced persistent threat (APT) is currently one of the most important threats considering the information security concept. APT persistently collects data from a specific target by exploiting vulnerabilities using diverse attack techniques. Many researchers have contributed to find approaches and solutions to fight against network intrusion and malicious software. However, only a few of these solutions are particularly focused on APT. In this paper, we introduce a structured study on semantic-aware work to find potential contributions that analyze and detect APT in details. We propose modeling phase that discusses the typical steps in APT attacks to collect the desired information by attackers. Our research explores social network and web infrastructure exploitation as well as communication protocols and much more for future networks and communications. The paper also includes some recent Zero-day attacks, use case scenarios and cyber trends in southeastern countries. To overcome these challenges and attacks, we introduce a detailed comprehensive literature evaluation scheme that classifies and provides countermeasures of APT attack behavior. Furthermore, we discuss future research direction of APT defense framework of next-generation threat life cycle.