Embracing the Inevitable: How to Contain Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

Whether you are an athlete or a cybercriminal, obtaining a ‘first step’ advantage is immensely valuable. Just as a quick start out of the gate allows an athlete to control the action, a zero-day exploit gives malicious actors an early window to infiltrate systems, move laterally, and achieve objectives like data theft or ransomware deployment before being detected and thwarted.

Zero-day vulnerability exploitation cannot be prevented but can be faced with confidence. A resilient IT infrastructure facilitates fast detection and effective response to both known and unknown threats. This article explores what helps organizations operate under attack and recover quickly, so they can stop worrying about the uncertainty brought by zero-day vulnerabilities.

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The Frustration of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

It’s an unsettling truth: All operating systems and software applications harbor vulnerabilities that remain unknown to both the vendor and the organizations using the software. While there is some confusion about the terms zero-day vulnerability, zero-day exploit, and zero-day attack, the concept behind them remains the same: Cybercriminals actively aim to create a situation where they have an unprotected environment in which they look for these vulnerabilities, and when they discover one, they may begin to exploit it to gain more privileges.

While zero-day attacks can be exasperating to contemplate, there is no reason to surrender. Instead, organizations should embrace the reality that attackers sometimes do take a faster first step and that there is little they can do to prevent the initial compromise. The key is to focus on preventing attackers from taking a second step, gaining that maximum privilege, and eventually getting access to valuable data or establishing control over the network.

In other words, the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability is just the beginning of the battle. To win that battle and minimize damage, security teams need to proactively protect data, detect and respond to attacks effectively, and recover quickly.

Protect Data

The first step in reducing the risk from zero-day threats is to minimize the attack surface. Some of the most important measures include configuring access controls, disabling unneeded services, implementing a patch management process, and segregating your network into distinct segments to isolate critical systems and sensitive data.

Another effective way to reduce the wiggle room for an attacker from the beginning is to enforce the least privilege principle combined with strong multi-factor authentication (MFA). That way, even if an adversary penetrates a system, their ability to move laterally is severely restricted because users have only the access necessary for their tasks and are authenticated for each instance of accessing sensitive data. For more robust security, enhance this approach with just-in-time elevated privileges that are granted only after additional verification and only for a limited period of time. Ensuring that admin accounts are created on a temporary basis and disposed of once a task is completed further limits an attacker’s ability to move laterally within the system.

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Detect and Respond

The detection and response controls help organizations enhance their self-awareness and prepare to resist a threat after it is discovered. Every organization concerned about zero-day attacks has to build the detection and response part of security architecture upon detailed knowledge of the processes, assets, and digital user footprints that form its cyber posture.

While organizations may not be able to anticipate the time and point of an intrusion, they know what the attacker wants to do. Identity threat detection and response (ITDR) solutions leverage this knowledge and focus on detecting threats related to identity and access controls, such as suspicious login attempts, access requests, or privilege changes. ITDR should be complemented with an endpoint detection and response (EDR) system to spot threats on endpoints. Working in tandem, ITDR can trigger response actions like blocking access and resetting credentials, while EDR ensures a prompt response to malicious activity on endpoints.

Security teams need to distinguish between planned system changes and unplanned ones to know which are actually suspicious and avoid being overwhelmed with false alerts. This is where file integrity monitoring (FIM) comes into play. FIM provides an early warning when files are modified unexpectedly to enable swift response to true threats.

Recover

The attacker’s goal is to force an organization to choose between two evils: either a continued downtime with a potential customer churn or the extortion itself. Therefore, it is vital to have a strategy in place to minimize business disruption in case of a successful attack. One element of this strategy is a solid backup and recovery solution supported by a tested process, which the organization can use to restore data and rapidly get systems back on track. The recovery strategy should cover backing up key data and systems, identifying which assets were affected in an incident, reverting unwanted changes, and restoring domain controllers.

Another crucial element is contingency planning, which involves preparing to operate under attack or in case of unavailability of a critical asset. Known as a part of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) management, robust backup and recovery, and good contingency planning, can minimize downtime and business losses and help break up the attack logic.

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Vulnerability Scanning

In addition to preparing for zero-day vulnerabilities, every organization should protect against known threats through rigorous patch management. In addition, many organizations regularly scan all systems with an automated tool designed to identify vulnerabilities. However, the increasing number of software products in use has made this process too time-consuming. Vulnerability scanning and patching, the management of these activities can be a daunting task in itself and organizations will have to find a balance Modern patch management solutions utilize a discovery process called a scan-less scan, which performs a real-time inventory of installed software and flags all vulnerabilities that are discovered, so security teams can patch them as soon as possible.

Conclusion

While it’s impossible to prevent malicious actors from exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, organizations can limit the impact of these attacks. Indeed, a properly configured security posture makes an organization more resilient to any attack, whether it’s a known scenario or a new zero-day. By implementing the best practices detailed here, they can contain intrusions and minimize downtime, data loss and other damage.