According to a study conducted by Ponemon Institute and commissioned by NetWitness a great part of the entities has been the target of the advanced threat which represents a methodology employed to evade an organizations present technical and process countermeasures which relies on a variety of attack techniques as opposed to one specific type.

The study polled 591 IT and IT security practitioners and revealed that 83% of them believe their organizations has been hit by an advanced attack and 71% report a growth of threats over the past 12 months. 70% of the polled say that advanced threats suggest a new, more dangerous threat landscape.

The poll further shows that majority of the organizations saw advanced exploits and malware successfully bypassed their anti-virus (AV) and intrusion detection system technologies. Apart from the difficulties related to preventing advanced threats it also may take one month or longer to detect such threats, as reported by 46% of the polled. At least half of the advanced attacks were aimed at stealing sensitive data including source code, non-financial business confidential information and financial information, say the respondents. Another 48 percent believe the targets were PII including customer or consumer information and employee records.