Introduction
Zero days presents a great amount of security risk to numerous organizations across the globe. The evolution and fast embrace of information technology by organizations and business in their daily operations have resulted in more advanced attacks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Zero-day vulnerability is a flow or security loopholes that exist in software or systems that are either unknown or have no security patches (Alazab et al., 2011). In most cases, the zero-day attack takes advantages of the exploits that exist in software that was previously not known. The exploit usually takes place the moment the vulnerability in the software is known, thus zero-day attack. It the complexity of this attack and vulnerability makes it daunting to safeguard an organization or business from zero-day exploits.
It is significant to note that, zero-day attacks exploit a system or software using the discovered vulnerability the moment the vulnerability is discovered. In other words, there are zero days between the time the vulnerability in the software is discovered and the time the exploit is performed on the software (Alazab et al., 2011). Every software product contains various bugs and loopholes that can be exploited by malicious personnel. However, the timely discovery and reporting of these bugs and security loopholes to the software company is imperative to mitigate the zero-day attack.
In most cases, if a potential security issue is discovered in software, the software company is notified so as to address the security flaw before it is exploited by malicious attackers. Given time, the security flaw can be fixed via the faulty code and a security patch or software update distributed by the software company. If a potential security flaw is discovered in software, timing is usually crucial since attackers are always in a constant pursuit of such information.
Microsoft has fallen victim to a series of zero-day attacks, not only once but numerous times. In most cases, the zero-day attacks that target Microsoft products usually hit after the organization has released its security patches and software updates. Cyber crooks usually time Microsoft’s security update cycle which is conducted every month. They time novel attacks right after Patch Tuesday (Bilge & Dumitras, 2012). Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of each month when Microsoft releases its security fixes and patches. There are a large number of Microsoft products that have been compromised through zero-day attacks. It is only after these attacks that the organization discovers new vulnerabilities and releases new updates.
The zero-day attack will only occur if the information about the potential security flaw is accessed by malicious attackers before the software company can fix and distribute a security patch. It usually takes time before an actual attack occurs in case potential attackers get access to information concerning a potential flaw in a software product. However, timing is crucial (Alazab et al., 2011).
It is tremendously complicated to discover zero-day attacks, particularly with the current and traditional cyber defenses. Traditional cyber defenses fail to discover and protect against zero-day attacks since their security measures focus on URL reputation and malware signature. Nevertheless, the information with zero day attack is unknown. It is significant to point out that cyber criminals are extremely skilled with their methods, thus allowing their malware and hacking applications to go undetected on a system for a long time (Bilge & Dumitras, 2012).
The threats associated with zero-day attacks and vulnerability exploits are extremely adverse. The attack can impact an organization in an extreme manner while destroying confidential and private information and data. It is imperative for software manufacturers to perform software testing and bug elimination before releasing a software product to the market.
References
Alazab, M., Venkatraman, S., Watters, P., & Alazab, M. (2011, December). Zero-day malware
detection based on supervised learning algorithms of API call signatures. In Proceedings
of the Ninth Australasian Data Mining Conference-Volume 121 (pp. 171-182). Australian
Computer Society, Inc.
Bilge, L., & Dumitras, T. (2012, October). Before we knew it: an empirical study of zero-day
Attacks in the real world. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and
communications security (pp. 833-844). ACM.
