Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are sophisticated and long-lived attacks that are often backed by nationstates. Despite the security community’s efforts to design and deploy specialized systems to combat them, APTs have remained prevalent while persisting undetected for significantly more time than commodity cyber threats. In this paper, we measure this difference by conducting the first longitudinal analysis of APT infrastructure by shedding light on the lifecycle of their domain names. To enable this study, we build Atropos, a novel measurement methodology that automatically and accurately labels DNS records of APT domain names, enabling us to understand their lifecycle and gain a more comprehensive and contextualized infrastructure picture than the one that is shared in public reports. Using the comprehensive infrastructure view that Atropos provides, we study 405 APT actors over a period spanning a decade and unveil several novel findings regarding their utilization of network infrastructure that have practical implications. We find that APT actors provision their IPs to their domain names 317 days on average before an attack is publicly reported. Furthermore, $73.6 \%$ of the APT IPs that are part of the attack infrastructure no longer point to their domains at the time of first public disclosure, highlighting that researchers and security practitioners need to consider historic DNS data in order to get a more comprehensive and accurate picture when training network detection, investigation, or attribution systems. Organizations that are more sensitive to APT attacks will need to retain network logs for at least 19 to 25 months in order to have higher probabilities of discovering whether they have been a target of an APT attack. Finally, we provide evidence that APT actors re-use hosting providers, deploy APT network infrastructure close to their intended attack targets, and increasingly utilize more cloud-fronting. These findings are important because they can guide future threat detection and attribution works.

This paper investigates the various technical and non-technical tools and techniques that software developers use to build and disseminate crypto mining apps on Android devices. Our study of 346 potential Android mining apps, collected between April 2019 and May 2022, has revealed the presence of more than ten mining apps on the Google Play Store, with at least half of those still available at the time of writing this (June 2022). We observed that many of those mining apps do not conceal their usage of the device's resource for mining which is considered a violation of the store's policies for developers. We estimate that more than ten thousand users have run mining apps downloaded directly from the Google Play Store, which puts the supposedly “stringent” vetting process into question. Furthermore, we prove that covert mining apps tend to be embedded into supposedly free versions of premium apps or pose as utility apps that provide valuable features to users. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that cryptojacking apps' resource consumption and malicious behavior could be insignificant. We presume that typical users, even though they might be running a mobile antivirus solution, could execute a mining app for an extended period without being alerted. We expect our results to inform the various actors involved in the security of Android devices against the lingering threat of cryptojacking and help them better assess the problem.