Zero Day Exploit

A zero day exploit takes advantage of a security vulnerability that is not yet known to the vendor or for which no patch is available. The term indicates that no time remains for countermeasures between discovery of the flaw and the first attack. Affected products include operating systems, browsers, VPN gateways, firewalls, hypervisors and application software. As conventional signature-based detection cannot address unknown vulnerabilities, behavioural analysis, anomaly detection, endpoint detection and response and network segmentation become more important. These are complemented by privilege restriction, system hardening, deactivation of unnecessary services and a reduced external attack surface. Once a patch becomes available, the speed of deployment determines the remaining risk, which makes structured patch management and a tested contingency plan essential.