A Year With a Zero-Day

You might be wondering what you never had heard of zero-day any before.

Is it real or not that a year has zero-day?

Well to break the surprise… It is not any day in a year rather it’s a flaw in the software, hardware, or firmware.

Zero-day is referred to an attack which has zero days between the discovery of a vulnerability and the first attack. That means when a zero-day vulnerability is made public, it is known as n-day or one-day vulnerability.

Some zero-day attacks are attributed to APT actors (advanced persistent threat), hacking, or cybercrime groups connected to the national government in any way. What attackers actually do is; they reserve their zero-day exploits for high-value targets.

One day vulnerabilities continue to exist and exploit even after the vulnerabilities have been patched. To cite an example: in 2017, The credit bureau Equifax was breached by hackers using an exploit against the Apache Struts web framework. Users must patch their devices once the zero-day vulnerability is made public. However, criminals keep on exploiting vulnerabilities as long as unpatched systems are exposed on the internet.

The detection of zero-day exploit is very difficult. Anti-malware software, IDSes (intrusion detection systems), and IPSes (intrusion prevention systems) proved to be ineffective against them. The best alternative to detect a zero-day attack is user behavior analytics. There are certain usage and behavior patterns that are recognized as normal to access networks, but activities occurring outside the normal scope indicates a zero-day attack. To exemplify, any server responds normally to a specific way while if found that outbound packets are trying to access, then it is crystal clear that attack is occurring.

A zero-day attack can’t be predicted in advance and there is no way to protect from these vulnerabilities. However, companies may try to reduce the risk exposure by following suggested ways.

  • Use virtual local area networks to divide some areas of the network.
  • Use IPsec protocol for encrypting and authentication to network traffic.
  • Do not use IDS/IPS as they are not capable of identifying the attack.
  • Network access control can be used.
  • Use security schemes like Wi-Fi protected access 2 for maximum protection.
  • Make your systems patched and up-to-date.
  • Perform thorough scanning of vulnerabilities.

Above mentioned ways cannot protect you from zero-day attack, but will surely help to minimize the risks.

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