Traditional criminal hackers when compared to modern day advance persistent thereat hackers display a wide array of differences despite their focus and drive is similar, their skills are totally different. Normally, traditional hackers would carry out a quick hacking attempt without much planning and the goal of the attack being intrusion through brute force to get data or ascertaining that a system was not secure. Usually, they would pull off one time attacks on the areas they had targeted. Advanced persistent thereat type of hackers as the name suggests are persistent, patient and stealthy (Kenley, 2014).
Advance persistent thereat hackers normally target private organizations or major states for purposes of political or business motives. They make use of techniques, which are sophisticated, and the target system is under heavy surveillance and multiple threats to analyze which one exploits the vulnerabilities of the system. Techniques used in such attacks are such as social engineering, phishing and creating backdoors into software being used by the target so that they can be able to extract the required information. The attackers place malicious lines of code within the system in an undetectable manner over time and then it is run at once to give full access and control (Tankard, 2011).
Traditional hackers are different from advance persistent thereat hackers since some might have intent of showing companies that their systems are vulnerable and that they require upgrades to make them more robust. Normally, they would work individually without many resources as compared to advanced persistent threat hackers who work in teams which are fully equipped and have numerous resources at their disposal.
Advance persistent threats are categorized by them having objectives, timelines, resources, being risk tolerant, having advanced penetration methods and skills, attacks being from certain origination points, numbers of systems both internal and external involved in the attack and the source of knowledge used to gather information regarding the target. Traditional script kiddies usually make use of already written scripts in formulation of attacks on systems. Systems should also be configured not to accept scripts from unknown sources to prevent systems being put at risk (Tankard, 2011).
Despite hacker attacks in some cases being undetectable, they can however be mitigated by putting intrusion detection systems in play and collection and analysis of system logs to detect activity originating from externally within the network (Vukalović & Delija, 2015).
Kenley, N. (2014). Hackers without borders: Global detectives in Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Clues, 32(2), 30-40.
Tankard, C. (2011). Advanced persistent threats and how to monitor and deter them. Network Security, 2011(8), 16-19. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/ns/ns2011.html#Tankard11
Vukalović, J., & Delija, D. (2015, May). Advanced persistent threats-detection and defense. In Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO), 2015 38th International Convention (pp. 1324-1330). IEEE.