"These advanced attacks have been going on for several years," said Timothy McKnight, vice president and CISO at Northrop Grumman, during a panel discussion on the topic of the "Advanced Persistent Threat," (APT) the term often used to describe attacks by hackers determined to break into companies and government agencies with the goal of stealing intellectual property or other sensitive information.

BACKGROUND:

Northrop Grumman's monitoring, detection and prevention systems see so many traces of well-organized and determined hacker groups that the aerospace giant has actually managed to keep track of distinct profiles of about a dozen separate groups constantly trying their tricks to break in over the years.

The cyber-intelligence group at Northrop Grumman keeps a tally of forensics on attacks emanating from the groups that each work as a team "waking up each day to get into Northrop Grumman," McKnight said. "We can tell what their attack procedures are, how they write the malware."

The typical attack methods are attempts to compromise user machines through zero-day vulnerabilities. While about 300 zero-day attack attempts were recorded last year, the pace has ramped up enormously where it's not uncommon to see zero-day exploits coming in at 11-minute intervals.