The Impacts of Zero-Day Attacks
Last week, we explained what zero-day vulnerabilities and attacks are. Essentially, zero-day vulnerabilities exist in the wild, with no patch available to prevent hackers from exploiting it. Today, we would like to expand on the impacts of these attacks.
What Do Zero-Day Attacks Depend On?
The impact a zero-day attack can have on your online presence can vary. Some of these effects include lost revenue, compliance violations, wasted time, and damage to your brand reputation.
Zero-day attacks depend on some important factors:
- How proactive about security the project maintainers are.
- How quickly project maintainers can react if something goes wrong.
- How proactive about security the community using that project is (CMS, plugin, etc.).
- How quickly the community using that project can react if something goes wrong.
The repetition here is intentional. Both developers and website owners should be proactively protecting their sites and be in a position to respond quickly in the event of an incident. This means monitoring for signs of an issue, and taking steps to block zero-day exploitation if no security patch is available for the vulnerable component.
If these interested parties — developers and users — don’t meet the challenge of proactive website security, the only thing remaining to assess the impact of a zero-day vulnerability is to know the number of potentially affected systems. Automation makes it easy for hackers to quickly take advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities.
Who Should Be Concerned With Zero-Day Attacks?
Developers should have processes in place to avoid vulnerabilities. These processes can include:
- code audits
- bug bounty programs
- manual tests
- automatic tests
- security awareness
Website owners should have protection, monitoring and response capabilities in case the above is not enough.
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