A Decade-long Landscape of Advanced Persistent Threats: Longitudinal Analysis and Global Trends

An advanced persistent threat (APT) refers to a covert and long-term cyberattack, typically conducted by state-sponsored actors, targeting critical sectors and often remaining undetected for long periods. In response, collective intelligence from around the globe collaborates to identify and trace surreptitious activities, generating substantial documentation on APT campaigns publicly available on the web. While a multitude of prior works predominantly focus on specific aspects of APT cases, such as detection, evaluation, cyber threat intelligence, and dataset creation, limited attention has been devoted to revisiting and investigating these scattered dossiers in a longitudinal manner.