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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.

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

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