Download the new white paper released by Obrela to learn more and how to protect your business from zero-day vulnerability.
What is zero-day vulnerability?
A zero-day vulnerability (also referred to as “0-day”) is a software vulnerability which prior to its discovery was unknown to security researchers and businesses. Until this type of flaw is mitigated, it represents an open opportunity for hackers to exploit to adversely affect the normal operations of programs, data flows and additional computers or networks, impacting businesses and their ability to deliver services and products to their customers.
What leads to a zero-day exploit?
All software platforms can potentially have vulnerabilities. Despite software developer’s best efforts to develop secure applications and to constantly monitor for new security flaws and quickly patch them, there is always a chance that hackers or malicious actors will identify these vulnerabilities first. This is when the race between the software developers to fix and hackers to exploit the vulnerability begins.
Identifying and protecting against zero-day attacks.
The fact is, detecting zero-day vulnerabilities remains a challenge for security teams. They have to search for potential vulnerabilities and monitor the external threat environment. They must update their vulnerability scanning tools to search for and identify zero-day vulnerabilities. Then, they have to patch the zero-days, which will involve testing their systems to ensure the ‘fix’ for the zero-day does not break any applications or infrastructure in their operating environment, often in near real-time.
Vulnerability scanning is time-consuming, taking time and resources away from other security priorities. Applying patches to fix vulnerabilities is even more time-consuming and is far too often incomplete if it is done at all.
Cyber security processes must evolve in response to these attacks. The nature of these vulnerabilities means detailed information is available only after the exploit has been identified, which happens as and after organizations have already been successfully attacked.
