Zero-Day is a term employed to describe an attack that threatens unaddressed or hitherto unknown security vulnerabilities within applications or software. The increasing commonality and complexity of so-called Zero-Day threats can be devastating for any business, as such attacks on this kind of Zero-Day vulnerability are able to sometimes take place without the user even realizing it.
How Bad can Zero-Day Attacks be?
Some Zero-Day attacks were so devastatingly successful that they have become notorious. They now serve as warnings for all organizations that they need to be more watchful and prepared to deal with such threats or face similarly catastrophic consequences.
Zero-Day attack examples include:
· Stuxnet, a virus/worm believed to originate in the US that made use of Zero-Day vulnerabilities to get privileged access to systems at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran. More than fifteen facilities in Iran were infiltrated and attacked by Stuxnet, with the nation’s nuclear program suffering serious damage.
· the infamous 2011 RSA attack. A Zero-Day vulnerability that existed within the Adobe Flash player was used in order to commence a campaign of spear-phishing aimed at employees of the RSA.
Although it is impossible to completely prevent Zero-Day attacks, there are a number of defensive measures that can be employed by organizations as forms of protection.
The Importance of Automatic Coverage
The best method to protect against the costs of a successful Zero-Day attack is to engage in prevention first. Email systems that lack adequate security are a common access point for the infiltration of networks by cyber-criminals, making it crucial for organizations to ensure that their email system is automatically protected.
The most effective method of protecting against Zero-Day threats in addition to other advanced email attacks is to make use of a particularly proactive and intuitive form of cloud email security. This security makes use of heuristics techniques and advanced AI to detect patterns of anomalies that are often not seen either by human users or applications.
Such advanced solutions can then come up with fixes with the use of AI and human intervention and have them efficiently and speedily distributed.
Organizations should invest in a comprehensive solution for cloud email security that is able to protect against Zero-Day threats. Solutions that are also capable of implementing and distributing fixes for those vulnerabilities means that making such investments is a move that will pay long term dividends.
Making Use of Next-Gen Antivirus Software
Zero-Day threats are not accounted for by standard forms of antivirus solutions. These solutions are designed for the detection of malware with the use of file signatures. However they can still play a role after the public announcement of the vulnerability.
The malware database will be able to be updated very quickly by the vendor to ensure that threat will then be defended against by the solution.
However, it is important for organizations to be able to defend their systems from as yet unknown Zero-Day malware. Next Generation Antivirus solutions are able to make use of threat intelligence, machine code learning analysis and behavioural analytics to identify when a system has been infected with some unknown form of malware.
Once that malware has been detected these solutions can block any malicious processes and stop the attack from reaching other endpoints.
Although this technology is as yet still not capable of detecting all forms of Zero-Day malware, it offers a significant reduction in the likelihood of attackers being able to use it to penetrate such endpoints.
Patch Management
Patch management and policies should be in place at all organizations. That information needs to be clearly provided to employees and coordinated with security teams, IT operations and development.
Automation should also be made use of for management and patches by bigger organizations.
Patch management solutions can be used for the automatic sourcing of patches from software providers in addition to identifying those systems that are in urgent need of being updated. These solutions are also capable of testing the new patch changes and having the patch automatically deployed to production.
This means that deployment or patch delays can be avoided and also ensures that the legacy system that is already in place will not be left behind or abandoned following system updates.
Virtual Patching and WAF for Applications
Though the penetration for the exploit can come from many channels, the actual attack and exploit most of the time is carried out on the application. It is very tough to know about a vulnerability in advance, which is why it is known as Zero-Day.
The ability to proactively prevent it and mitigate risk on Zero-Day can still be done by deploying WAF to protect your application. WAF comes with an out of the box set of policies which in a managed service can also be updated based on learnings from traffic and attack vectors and application vulnerabilities uncovered via security assessment.
Indusface with our Zero-Day Analysis for the past 5+ years has found out that 80% of the Zero-Day attacks get blocked if you have a policy in place to block the attack payload based on patterns.
(Example- A vulnerability in Apache framework that allows remote command injection to be done via the HTTP payload is a validZero-Day vulnerability once it is known. But most WAF will already have policies in place to block command injection payloads via HTTP request and hence even if the application is still vulnerable the WAF will block the exploits from being carried out by blocking them.).
In addition a virtual patch can be applied quickly to further increase your defence while you can take time to fix and patch the origin systems where the zero day vulnerability has been reported and made public.
Other solutions
There are also other, simpler, methods for companies to combat the problem of Zero-Day exploit attacks.
User education is critical to prevention of these attacks. This makes it important to teach good security habits to employees and other users along with best practices and other tips to ensure their online safety. This can also make certain that an organization is protected from all kinds of digital threats, including Zero-Day attacks.
Conclusion
Although Zero-Day threats look like they are here to stay, organizations can protect themselves by remaining vigilant and using the best automated coverage to ensure their cyber safety. Indusface from AppTrana provides the best automated coverage to ensure protection from all such attacks.