Zero Day Attack Protection

Zero-Day Threat Protection

Security flaws exist in every piece of technology. Software vulnerabilities occur when organizations either push out a new feature without testing for exploit or vendors release a patch that causes a zero-day event.

Email security software providers like Trustifi fully understand the importance of zero-day projection. Powered by AI and ML embedded within their cloud-based offering, Trustifi security researchers leverage continuous telemetry data captured by their cloud-based platform to look for early signs of unknown threats, including zero-day malware embedded within phishing emails.

Bad actors will create a zero-day exploit and embed this file inside an email as an attachment or malicious link. Without advanced email security solutions like Trustifi, these unknown malware files will bypass more security tools and end up in their victim's inboxes.

How Do Zero-Day Exploits Work?

Zero-day exploits start with the hacker creating a payload targeting an unpatched operating system or application. These elements will most likely have a vulnerability that has yet to be patched or are waiting for the vendor to develop a software update to remediate the issue.

"Sources indicate that the average remediation time for a vulnerability ranges from 60 to 150 days, with critical vulnerabilities averaging around 65 days, though this depends on the severity and the organization's process." The time between the discovered vulnerability and the time for organizations to remediate the risk is called mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR).

Zero-day exploits often happen before security teams develop a protection plan to reduce the threat against their digital assets and networks. Even with next-generation firewalls, patch management, and intrusion prevention to help reduce the attack surfaces, hackers still exploit users, devices, and hosts using zero-day exploit techniques.

What Does a Zero-Day Threat Look Like?

A zero-day attack could occur when every device becomes locked up, reboots, or there is a sudden burst in network traffic across specific firewalls, sending data files externally through various internet connections.

Zero-day attacks often happen on holidays, weekends, at night, or heavy stock trading days. Hackers want to create as much havoc as possible, focusing on specific dates and organizations to gain as much publicity as possible.

Hackers aim to strike fear into their targets. They use zero-day to raise awareness of the causes they want to see suffer. Climate change, globalization, ongoing wars in the Middle East, and immigration in Europe are examples of global events hackers will target.

Using zero-day exploits, hackers alter websites, steal valuable government data and post its contents on the Internet, or steal bitcoin from government or organization digital wallets.

How Can You Stay Protected from Zero-Day Security Events?

Security operations teams with the vendor's technical support need to partner to help stay ahead of zero-day attacks. Managing vulnerabilities starts with a security strategy focusing on proactive ways to protect against zero-day. An unknown vulnerability will also exist. There is no such thing as a perfectly patched system, host, or device.

Security teams must continuously leverage vulnerability scanners to assess which systems carry the most security risk against a zero-day attack. Critical systems identified by penetration testing for vulnerability scanning inside the corporate network or in the cloud need to have the highest priority for virtual patching and remediation.

Organizations must deploy adaptive controls for real-time detection across the email channel, endpoint, and cloud. Real-time detection solutions will identify suspicious activities despite unpatched, undiscovered, or unreported vulnerabilities. These AI systems used data from their LLMs to identify early breach indicators before an exploit occurred. This early detection based on AI also reduces false positives and negatives.

Always Stay Informed

Security teams also need to subscribe to threat intelligence services to keep up with the latest information regarding potential risks, potential vulnerabilities, and the latest news surrounding ransomware attacks. Threat intelligence information also helps security teams develop response capabilities, including better use of AI for zero-day attack prevention, attack surface management, and blocking unauthorized file transfer software from becoming loaded within their enterprise.

Use Extra Security Measures

Threat intelligence information and peer information sharing illuminate other security measures security teams can deploy, including antivirus software solutions, automatic updates of essential applications, and additional network security, including network segmentation.

The Importance of Audits and Third-party Penetration Testing

Security teams and cybersecurity senior executives must ensure the organization invests in internal auditing resources and quarterly third-party penetration testers. These engagements will give the organization complete visibility into zero-day and other potential weaknesses. The pen test will help the organization determine how exploitable their various networks, digital hosts, or devices are based on the current vulnerabilities. Pen testing and vulnerability audit help establish a prior per asset. Regular security audits also help justify additional security protection in investments to stay current with changes in the global security landscape.

Use Limited Applications

Another strategy to help reduce the exploit attack of an organization's attack surface is the limitation of application usage, which is achieved by reducing the number of applications and platforms used by the organization. This strategy reduces attack surface exposure to zero-day and makes financial sense in controlling operations costs and lowering risk.

Security teams focusing their attention on a limited scope of platforms can significantly improve their organization's security posture, reduce the number of security incidents they will need to respond to, and reduce human error from misconfiguration, resulting in possible zero-day attacks. These misconfigurations include installing faulty virtual patches, enabling a feature on an application that opens the door to cross-site scripting attacks, and lateral movement propagation from ransomware.