Zero-day Vulnerability and System Protection

Cyber crimes have become more prevalent today; according to Techjury, there were 22 billion breached records in 2021, and 64% of companies worldwide have experienced at least one cyber attack.

The statistics get even scarier as an estimated 30,000 websites are hacked by hackers daily. While most cyber security companies like Fortinet, cisco, Crowdstrike, and many others struggle to combat cyber crimes, hackers are developing newer strategies and viruses to infiltrate most companies’ systems and steal their data. 

ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY

A zero-day vulnerability is a new exploit still in its early stage and has not been patched or discovered yet. Hackers can exploit any system or infrastructure running on that particular software. 

Some classic examples of zero-day vulnerability (N-day)

In 2016, CVE-2016-4117, a zero-day exploit flaw undiscovered in Adobe Flash player, affected many systems using this software. 

Another exploit was the CVE-2016-0167 which targeted windows machines and allowed for high privilege attacks and takeover of the device.  

Another N-day exploit was the Stuxnet worm which attacked the operating system and the supervisory data acquisition systems, and it was a nasty worm that spread through USB drives. 

In 2021, a new exploit estimated to affect over 100 million systems worldwide,  Log4jshell; a flaw in the programming language in java, which developers mainly used in building most infrastructure base programs. 

HOW DOES ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY COME ABOUT 

The software might become vulnerable due to a couple of reasons, which include:

• Lack of Regular Updates: When there are no regular updates, this can pave the way for the system to get hacked; users must perform constant updates. 
• Free privilege: Use what is needed, and most time, only give people what they need. 
• Lack of AntiVirus: Protecting the infrastructure is critical; keep the system protected and antivirus constantly updated. 
• Weak Passwords: weak passwords are one of the core ways hackers get in. They are password breaches every time, and people always use the same password, so use a more complex password and multifactor authentication. 

HOW TO NOTICE ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY

Machine Learning: Data from existing hacks and databases can track where and how the hackers behaved, but all this can change a bit; this gives you an idea of where the attack is coming from. 

Previous Malware attack: Looking at the pattern of the malware attack can help figure out the attacker’s next move, as little variations might occur, but the practice is mostly the same. 

CONCLUSION 

Zero-day exploits are very hard to notice because they are unknown; taking into account this, we must protect our system first and keep a watchful eye for anything suspicious. 

To learn how hackers hack and the tools they use, this is another excellent article to know more.