Zero-day attacks (ZDAs) are security threats circumventing an undiscovered vulnerability in a system. Organizations need robust tracking, prevention, and counter strategies to mitigate the risks posed by ZDA.
ZDA is the challenging aspect of risk management as it attacks a signature-based security infrastructure that goes undetected by the affected parties posing risks to businesses. Organizations need to evaluate the systems, networks, and internal management to prevent, detect and respond to ZDAs. Here are a few methods for tracking and prevention strategies to mitigate ZDAs.
Tracking
Vulnerability detection alerts businesses of any forthcoming attack and allows them to track system gaps. This method ensures that the IT personnel is aware of what is being installed on the networks within the organizations. Here are a few tracking methods businesses need to consider.
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Conduct behavior and log analysis
Organizations need to feign that there are vulnerabilities within the system that the threat actors know of. Hence businesses need to identify statistical moves beyond the baseline limits. At the same time, security teams need to comprehend baseline network, endpoint, and user analysis behavior. Efficient correlation, aggregation, and analysis of logs from vital network devices and systems are essential. These factors will assist the organizations in establishing compromised systems, abnormal behavior, and threat indicators associated with ZDAs.
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Initiate Vulnerability Scanning, Penetration Testing, and Management
Businesses need to run a quarterly scan for vulnerabilities in crucial production systems and all the new ones placed into production. Simultaneously, code scanning should be conducted to detect common coding errors and restrict open cyberattack opportunities. Additionally, threats can be managed by regularly identifying threats and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Businesses need to identify the threat indicators that potentially display active threat actors targeting known and unknown vulnerabilities.
Prevention
To prevent any attack from happening an up-to-date antivirus system and a robust firewall can be established to ensure minimal unauthorized entry into the network. At the same time, errors in misconfigurations that could augment ZDAs need to be analyzed. Here are a few preventive measures businesses need to ensure.
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Manifest Threat Intelligence Platforms
Unlike traditional cyber-attacks, modern threats are widespread and automated.
ZDAs target numerous touchpoints in the IT infrastructure, leveraging the narrow window amid vulnerability and patch release.
Protection against such comprehensive attacks necessitates a solid threat intelligence platform. These platforms leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to condense the data into valuable insights that contain information about potential attacks and anonymous vulnerabilities.
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Evaluate Firewall and Anti-Malware Configurations
Firewalls can block unwanted traffic and restrict internal systems from initiating unusual connections to external systems. At the same time, it addresses IoT and application connections for automatic updates. Additionally, current exploits may be utilized by threat actors to plan ZDAs. Therefore, organizations need to install updated anti-malware that detects and blocks the ZDAs resembling a known attack.
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Security Coalition
Organizations often rely on numerous disconnected and standalone security solutions. These solutions are effective, however, they tend to minimize the effectiveness of an organization’s cyber security team with overwhelming data to configure and monitor. This results in overworked personnel overlooking critical alerts like ZDAs. A streamlined security platform is a unified solution with visibility and control access over the organization’s infrastructure that is crucial in preventing distributed ZDAs.
Also Read: Addressing the Cybersecurity Insurance Challenges and Considerations
ZDAs reduce the probability of an organization escaping major damage, if the attack is not tracked and prevented appropriately. A robust, coordinated, automated response across an organization’s entire infrastructure is essential to avoiding fast-paced ZDA campaigns and gaining a likelihood of successful attack prevention.
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