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.

We have a webinar on in which Sucuri Co-Founder, Tony Perez, dives into the details of what implications a website owner can expect to have after their website is compromised.

Watch the Webinar

Web Asset Memory Test

I want you to do the following exercise.

Try to remember every piece of software that you have installed on your web server, including the CMS your website is running on and all plugins, scripts, and add-ons you’ve added to it.

Can you remember them all? If you can, congratulations!

For those that have trouble, we recommend reading Tony’s post on creating a Basic Website Security Framework.

Do You Have a Plan?

Now, imagine that a zero-day vulnerability is present in one of those components and ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I have a security solution in place that can help me mitigate the risk until a patch is available?
• Do I have a plan in case my website gets compromised?

If the answer to those questions is no, then you should hope that attackers don’t find a security hole in your site.

A site with no protection relies on the developers alone to be sure there are no security flaws in their code.

We have a website security solution that will suit your website or your clients’ websites needs. The Sucuri Firewall blocks most zero-day attacks before they are disclosed to the public. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions about our website security products and plans. We are here to help you find the best website security solution for you.

If you don’t want to miss any high-impact vulnerability disclosures, sign up for our monthly newsletter.