The Hidden Risks in Your Applications: Zero-Day Threats

Hidden Risks in Applications You Just Purchased and Didn’t Know About

The cybersecurity challenge we're facing is unprecedented — and most organizations are conducting business as usual with the illusion of digital safety. More often than not, people download new applications and integrate them into their systems before they test them for malware. Flip that on its head: If you test before you download, you’ll be one step ahead of the bad guys.

Shattering The Illusion of Digital Safety

At CodeHunter, we’re committed to disrupting the status quo — and part of our promise is to shatter the illusion that the digital world is safe. We like to say there are two kinds of organizations: Those that have been hacked — and those who have been hacked and don’t know it. We’re not out to scare you: Our goal is to remove blinders so you’re aware of both the risks to your data and the game-changing solutions.

Hidden Risks: Zero-days, Everyone’s Biggest Nightmare

This past year, a series of zero-day attacks were broadcast across the globe — including the SolarWinds attack; an attack at Microsoft; ransomware affecting the Colonial Pipeline Company; and a separate ransomware incident that shut down large meat processing plants at JBS. Zero-day attacks are everyone’s biggest nightmare in the cybersecurity world.

One of the most famous zero-day attacks — the Heartbleed bug — existed for two years before researchers at Google’s security team discovered it in 2014. The bug was a vulnerability in an OpenSSL cryptography library used for online banking, credit card payments, and other secure online transactions at major companies like Amazon and Yahoo. Although impact is hard to assess, it was estimated to have cost $500 million for the companies impacted.

A relatively recent zero-day attack occurred when Zoom was running on Windows 7 and a vulnerability allowed an attacker to remotely access a user’s PC. If the owner of the PC was an administrator, the hacker could take over the entire machine. The vulnerability was quickly identified and a patch was released — though preventing ongoing attacks required a quick patching response from everyone running Zoom on Windows 7.

Sometimes we get lucky and security researchers discover vulnerabilities in time to stop an attack. Just months after the well-publicized zero day attacks on Microsoft servers this year, Microsoft was warned about a security gap in Azure that allowed hackers to view any customer’s database. If you’re a Microsoft user, this one hits home.

The Solution is Simple: Test Before You Download

When your business is growing and you find the perfect applications to support your goals, go right ahead and buy them — just be sure to test before you download. If you haven’t thought about testing, start with CodeHunter — we protect organizations from the most advanced internal and external threats, including zero-days. CodeHunter knows how the bad guys think — our dangerously intelligent platform can detect malware that’s disguised or lying dormant, waiting for one bad actor to activate a logic bomb that could crumble your entire organization.