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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