Organizations take great care to secure their network and infrastructure. But even with responsible and sustained investments in defenses Organizations are still at risk. Attackers can bypass Organizations robust security through an uncharted software vulnerability; a loophole revealed only by the persistent probing of a determined hacker. This is known as Zero Day. Zero Day is a software vulnerability that is previously unknown and unpatched and therefore can be exploited by cyber-criminals to gain entry to a target network. A hacker finds a Zero Day through hours. Weeks or even months of painstaking effort. The attacker scours through lines of code probing applications and operating systems to find some weakness, some flaw. He methodically investigates its target application with an array of reverse engineering tools and techniques forcing the software to reveal a small crack in the defenses that provides them a way to secretly execute a malicious code. With this vulnerability in hand the hacker has a choice help the software vendor by providing them information about the vulnerability or sell it to a broker in the hands of a black-market vendor of zero-day exploits.
Zero Day Attack
A Zero-day vulnerability, at its core, is a flaw, a glitch or bugs. It is an unknown exploit in the wild that exposes vulnerability in software or hardware and can create complicated problems well before anyone realizes something is wrong. In fact, a zero-day exploit leaves NO opportunity for detection at first. Zero-day attacks exploit are usually programming errors or other vulnerabilities in hardware or software. It’s called a zero-day because there are “Zero Days” for software developers or hardware vendors to patch the flaw. It’s finding a way to open up or crack user data or communications that was previously unknown. Consider that user is putting all of their digital information into a safe and imagine that that safe has a combination at the front that only user know. So their information is very secure. A zero day flaw is like a cyber-criminal figuring out that he can take a hammer and hit one little screw on the back of users safe and the safe will pop open. So Cyber attacker is able to open users safe without the unlock code to get into users safe or get users communications and get users data without users permission. Zero Day vulnerabilities get their name from the fact that programmers have zero days to fix them before they are used in an attack. By the time a software developers or hardware vendor’s finds out about them, everything is already exploding.
Who Uses Zero-Days: Glitches and bugs can show up in any new piece of software or software update. Lots of people spend their days searching for them. Some of those people are analysts and engineers who have positive intensions and focus on Cyber-Security. They look for bugs and problems so that they can fix software and protect computer systems. There is a legitimate part of the market, there are cyber security researchers and cyber security companies, technology companies who would discover zero-day vulnerabilities and those companies typically work with the software vendors to make sure that the vulnerability is patched in time. So that users are not left open and vulnerable to an attack by a Cyber-criminal.
But there’s also a black market for Zero days and this is a place where Zero days are sold for large sums of money, including governments. Sometimes friendly; sometimes not. Those governments’ will then stockpile the Zero days and use them at a later time for their own potentially nefarious purposes. Also on the lookout are Cyber-Criminals, also known as Black-Hat Hackers. They seek bugs that will let them weasel into computer systems, often to wreak havoc.
What are the risks of Zero Days?
Zero day vulnerabilities are weapons of Cyber Criminals. These digital weapons can weaken organizations Cyber security. If the organizations leave open a flaw and software that can be used to access data or communications that opening can be used by cyber criminals so it can be exploited for purposes of cyber identity theft and data theft. So patching systems does allow organizations to protect against whatever the known vulnerabilities are. But that is exactly the value of a zero-day it’s that there is no patch. These types of vulnerabilities are known as Zero-Day because the original programmer has zero days after learning about it to patch. These flaws are usually the result of errors made during the writing of the software, giving an attacker wider access to the rest of the software. These attacks are rarely discovered right away. In fact, it often takes not just days but months and a sometimes year before a developer learns of the vulnerability that led to an attack.
What are the risks of Zero Days?
Zero day vulnerabilities are weapons of Cyber Criminals. These digital weapons can weaken organizations Cyber security. If the organizations leave open a flaw and software that can be used to access data or communications that opening can be used by cyber criminals so it can be exploited for purposes of cyber identity theft and data theft. So patching systems does allow organizations to protect against whatever the known vulnerabilities are. But that is exactly the value of a zero-day it’s that there is no patch. These types of vulnerabilities are known as Zero-Day because the original programmer has zero days after learning about it to patch. These flaws are usually the result of errors made during the writing of the software, giving an attacker wider access to the rest of the software. These attacks are rarely discovered right away. In fact, it often takes not just days but months and a sometimes year before a developer learns of the vulnerability that led to an attack.
Vulnerability timeline: A zero-day attack happens once that flaw, or software/hardware vulnerability is exploited and Cyber criminals release a malicious program to exploit the weakness / flaw, before a developer has an opportunity to create a patch to fix the vulnerability—hence “zero-day.”
- A company’s developers create software, but unbeknown to them this new software contains vulnerability.
- The Cyber-criminal spots that vulnerability either before the developer does or acts on it before the developer has a chance to fix it.
- The Cyber criminals’ writes and implements exploit code while the vulnerability is still open and available for attack.
- After releasing the exploit, either the public recognizes it in the form of identity or information theft or the developer catches it and creates a patch to stop the cyber-bleeding.