What is the “Zero day” vulnerability all about?

Have you ever heard of zero day? We live in a time when companies need to be increasingly vigilant about the cybersecurity of their respective technological environments. In this respect, there are several types of threats that aim not only to cause technological damage to organizations, but also to impact their respective operations.

Generally, it becomes extremely complex to identify certain types of vulnerabilities without the product developers themselves having previously identified them, as well as disclosing their respective fixes.

Thus, having an environment with enhanced information security is undoubtedly essential for any company to function properly.

For this reason, several companies have invested year after year in solutions that make it possible to bring greater control of the technological park, whether related to infrastructure, as well as in the transfer of data and confidential content.

Given this aspect of cybersecurity, what is the “Zero day” vulnerability all about?

How can your company create protection mechanisms against this type of threat?

This is the topic we will discuss in this article.

ANALYSIS OF SCENARIOS RELATED TO ZERO DAY

Before delving into such vulnerability, let us initially proceed with such a line of reasoning.

Note that it is very common when we are involved in a certain project, whose goal is to implement a new application in our respective environment, to ensure that such application has the necessary security mechanisms, as well as meets the guidelines set forth in the company’s information security policy.

This aims to ensure quality standards, thus meeting the security and usability aspects.

Imagine that overnight, your company puts a certain application into production without even checking if it meets the necessary standards required by the organization. Can you assess the size of the information security risk that your company could end up exposing itself for such an action?

Another point that should be considered is that sometimes an evaluation or demonstration scenario may not correspond in a reliable way to a production environment, and therefore there may be technical differences between the demo environment and the production environment.

Based on this, let’s clarify what the vulnerability, known as “Zero Day” is all about.

WHAT IS ZERO DAY VULNERABILITY?

The “Zero day” vulnerability is a security breach identified by attackers in a given product without the company responsible for developing the product being able to identify it in advance.

In this type of vulnerability, the company responsible for the development of the product ends up discovering such a breach only during the moment in which a certain company suffers a type of attack caused by this breach.

The fix for the Zero-day vulnerability occurs as soon as the manufacturer identifies where the product’s indefensibility lies and can create a software patch that corrects the identified vulnerability.

However, it is important to emphasize that this correction may not always be performed in a timely manner.

Once the attacker succeeds in his attempt, the company may be completely vulnerable, lose confidential information, and consequently have its respective image negatively exposed to its customers.

Thus, you might ask yourself:

“How is it possible to protect the technological security of my company against possible types of attacks whose breaches have even been previously identified by the manufacturers responsible for the products? ” Undoubtedly, this is an interesting and pertinent question.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

As we have seen in this article, it is undoubtedly a great challenge for all companies to have adequate measures to try to detect and respond to attacks caused by Zero Day vulnerability.

This certainly has as one of the justifications that technology evolves very quickly, and more and more cyber criminals are aware of new intrusion techniques, including those aimed at causing unauthorized access, to harm the target organization.

Thus, having a proper technological infrastructure is undoubtedly very important for your company to have an additional security layer, and to be increasingly prepared to detect these types of attacks. In addition to tools and policies suitable for this scenario, to mitigate or remedy the situation, such as the firewall and backup routines, a great ally in this aspect are tools that guarantee stratified visibility of everything that passes through the network, helping in the complete identification of suspicious traffic.

With this in mind, Telcomanager, Latin  America’s leader in the network management software industry, since 2002 in the market with a unique and innovative methodology, provides intelligent solutions for data monitoring in order to provide complete visibility to the customer’s infrastructure, allowing your company to follow the main aspects of its network.