**Abstract**

Modern-day malware is intelligent enough to hide its presence and perform stealthy operations in the background. Advance Persistent Threat (APT) is one such kind of malware attack on sensitive corporate and banking networks to stay there for a long time undetected. In real-time corporate networks, identifying the presence of intruders is a big challenging task for security experts. Recent APT attacks like Carbanak, The Big Bang, and Red Echo attack (targeting the Indian power sector) are ringing alarms globally. New data exfiltration methods and advancements in malware techniques are the two main reasons for rapid and robust APT evolution. Although many traditional and hybrid methods are available to detect this stealthy malware, the number of target-specific attacks are increasing rapidly at global level. Attackers have been crafting payloads resistant to malware sandbox environments so that traditional sandboxing techniques may not work with these APT malware detection. In this paper, we shed light on various Data Mining, Machine Learning techniques and frameworks used in both Attribution and Detection of APT malware. Added to this, our work highlight GAP analysis and need for paradigm shift in existing techniques to deal with evolving modern APT malware.

**Keywords:** APT, Targeted Malware, Data Exfiltration, APT Attribution
