> View this now

Published on: June 2007
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) (203 kb)
Length: 9 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
Zero-day attacks. No other vulnerability today strikes more fear into an IT administrator responsible for protecting the company’s most valuable assets – its strategic information and the systems that store, process and communicate that information.

Firewalls and antivirus software remain an important line of defense against malicious code entering your computing environment – or worse, actually executing on employee desktops. But these traditional security techniques depend on the ability to stay ahead of the hackers by patching known vulnerabilities, identifying signatures of known malware and rejecting applications of unknown origin or function.

Sophisticated hackers know this, and are increasingly mounting attacks that take advantage of the unknown and unseen. They’ve even learned how to install rootkits to steal passwords and other sensitive information, create zombie computers, launch denial-of-service and spam attacks, and more – essentially controlling systems for their own purposes while remaining undetectable.

It used to be that a vulnerability could go exposed for months without being attacked, giving vendors plenty of time to create and distribute a patch. No more. Now it’s the hackers who have the head start in the security race.

As hackers learn to maximize the damage they do, we’re seeing a new epidemic of zero-day attacks. These exploits are designed to infect systems before vulnerability has been recognized and patched, or before a malware signature has been identified and incorporated in antivirus software.