Within the cybersecurity landscape, zero-day vulnerabilities have become a significant threat to companies, especially bigger enterprises. It is a form of cyberattack in which a security flaw that is undiscovered by the organization is exploited by attackers.
Zero-day threats pose a serious challenge to enterprises as it becomes difficult to detect and mitigate an attack which is unknown. These threats exploit vulnerabilities or flaws in software, hardware, or firmware that are not yet known to the vendor or the manufacturer. They leave organizations vulnerable because the vendor has not had the chance to fix the vulnerability yet.
Why Should Zero-Day Attacks Be a Top Priority?
Zero-Day attacks are considered dangerous because the developer has had ‘zero-days’ to respond to the attack. Discovering zero-day attacks can be challenging because these flaws are unknown until they are identified through detection strategies. These attacks often target large organizations, government departments, IoT systems, and users having access to valuable business data. Here are some of the risks that can have devastating consequences on enterprises and individuals:
Retrospective Detection Against Zero-Day Threats
Retrospective detection is a cybersecurity approach that identifies security threats by sifting through historical data. This historical data includes logs, network activity, and threat intelligence. Unlike real-time detection, which aims to detect threats as they happen, retrospective detection reveals undetected malicious activities after they have occurred. This approach is essential for identifying threats and vulnerabilities that traditional techniques have missed.
Retrospective detection can play a critical role in spotting signs of zero-day attacks as they often go undetected. We have discussed some of the primary ways that retrospective detection can help.
Identify and flag undetected malicious activities
Retrospective detection involves a thorough analysis of historical data including past logs, endpoint activities, and network activities. This analysis identifies initially missed malicious behavior as well as reveals the true extent of the threat. It automatically searches historical network data of the enterprise. This eliminates blind spots, enabling security teams to see more and stop threats.
Retrospective detection can identify and flag malicious activities in the network, providing security teams with a clear understanding of a zero-day threat. When such a threat is discovered, the collected data is compared with the indicators of compromise (IoC). If the data matches a known signature from the database, security teams can take necessary actions to contain the exploit.
Automated data matching with IoC database
Retrospective detection focuses on highlighting traces left behind during a malware’s execution. This data is compared with the IoC database. A retrospective detection tool automatically compares the data to quickly spot threats that got missed by the cybersecurity tools. This eliminates the need to manually search for IOCs in historical records during active attacks.
Thus, retrospective detection helps accelerate threat identification and minimize respond time. Security teams no longer need to manually search and compare IOCs with the collected data. Consequently, they can significantly reduce the research time and focus on mitigating threats, which is not much in case of a zero-day attack.
Enable contextual threat analysis
Retrospective detection leverages contextual threat analysis to determine the source, delivery methods and severity of the zero-day attack. It generates detailed insights into the attack which enables security teams to understand the attack better. This further helps them make informed decisions during the threat mitigation process.
With such intelligence, the team can develop more effective countermeasures for the attack and other threats with similar IoC.
Challenges in Retrospective Detection
Retrospective detection is an effective technique for reducing the risk of a zero-day attack or detecting malware hidden in the system. However, there are challenges that enterprises might face while adopting this technique.
- Retrospective detection involves gathering and analyzing a huge amount of data to identify threats. Managing this vast data can be overwhelming for the analysis process, making it challenging to identify threats efficiently.
- Retrospective detection is vulnerable to false positives as it can be hard to differentiate between normal user activities and potential threats. As a result, security teams may face an increased workload, investigating benign activities flagged as threats.
- The constant generation of new malicious programs can lead advanced attackers to evade detection. The security teams need to constantly update their IoC database to maintain the effectiveness of the detection method.
Despite these challenges, deploying retrospective detection combined with threat hunting and behavior analysis can enhance your threat detection capabilities.
Solutions like Fidelis Network® can be your one-stop solution that offers a comprehensive platform to detect, identify, and mitigate threats in your system. Enterprises can improve their detection and analysis capabilities with Fidelis Network® NDR solution against the emerging threats, including zero-day attacks. Embracing these practices will ensure a robust and resilient cybersecurity posture for organizations.
Get comprehensive protection against potential security threats
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How Can Organizations Minimize Exposure to Zero-Day Threats?
Detecting a zero-day threat can be difficult as they are undetected by the security solutions deployed by the organization. It can pose a serious risk as it can lead to data theft, financial loss, and reputational damage.
To minimize the risk of a zero-day threat, enterprises must adopt a strong security approach which involves different methods and techniques. Here are some of the popular ones:
