More on Zero Days?

In last week’s #WeekendWisdom number 96, I explained what a zero day was. The reason I brought up this topic in the first place was because, as at that date, 2021 had already become a year where there was a record number of zero days being detected.

How is it a record number of zero days?

The number that was reported then was like 66 zero days:

• 20 were associated with Microsoft products
• 15 zero days were associated with Apple products, which people think Apple is the most secure platform … maybe not
• Google had 11 zero days

So previous years there might have been 40 or 50 zero days detected in the whole year. But here we are still in September and we’ve already blown through those records.

Even in just the last week since I recorded the last #WeekendWisdom, there have been four more zero days detected. Three of them associated with Apple products and one with Google Chrome.

So this really is turning out to be a year of the zero days. They really are happening a lot.

How do you protect yourself

So please folks be sure that you put in place good robust patching process to make sure you keep all your software up to date as early as possible. Also do things like keep your backups, do good backups, test the backups to make sure that you can recover from those backups and also make sure you train your staff. But keep your software patched.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

The post #WeekendWisdom 097 Record Number of Zero Days appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..

Where is this coming from?

Over the last two #WeekendWisdoms I talked about needing to do updates for vulnerabilities and when it comes to software vulnerabilities zero days are usually the most critical.

You see when security researchers are analysing various software like Microsoft, Apple and Google products, if they discovery a vulnerability in that software, they will report it to the vendor and give them an opportunity to rectify it and fix it before they make it public. They usually give them a period of months, normally it is usually 3 months.

What are Zero Days?

But in the case of zero days what happens is that a vulnerability is exposed on a day when nobody is aware of it until everybody is suddenly aware of it, including the vendor and including criminal gangs.

These cyber criminal gangs will immediately start looking to try and exploit that zero day vulnerability, while the vendors are rushing to try and fix it, to put out an update to fix that vulnerability.

That can take time. It can take days, it could take weeks to fix it. So it’s kind of a race against time for the cyber criminals to try and crack it and exploit it and for the vendors to fix it and update it.

What should you do?

So if you ever hear me talking about “There’s a zero day vulnerability out there that you need to patch!”, you should be looking to try and patch that as quickly as possible.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

The post #WeekendWisdom 096 Zero Days appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..