Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are groups of cyber threat actors — usually affiliated with nation states — who possess extraordinary capabilities, resources, and access to dark market zero-day exploits. Such actors not only use advanced techniques to establish a foothold in a target organisation’s infrastructure, but remain persistent, evading detection tools and maintaining communication with command-and-control (C2C) servers.

The talk provided glimpses of initial research work at Prof. Shukla’s group towards tracking, analysing, and attributing APT groups using India-local sensors, measurements, and AI/ML-based techniques — building a capability independent of US-centric threat intelligence.

Bio: Prof. Sandeep Kumar Shukla is currently Director of IIIT Hyderabad. Before joining in August 2025, he was the Rajiv and Ritu Batra Chair Professor in Cyber Security at IIT Kanpur. He is an IEEE Fellow.