New Technology Market: Zero-day Exploit

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The World Wide Web has become a catalyst for hackers, organize criminals, insider threats, political, social action groups, and anonymous groups to excite fear on individuals, private and the public sector. These threat actors can launch malware, rootkits, spam, botnets and a host of other threat vectors at any occasion.
IT Specialist and system administrator’s job duties are to test, patch and install the latest security updates and software fixes on an organization existing system. However, this task can become a race against time in trying to mitigate a security breach. Many times the system admin has to wait for the software vendor to produce a patch to fix the problem. This is most apparent when a company is infected with a Zero-Day Exploit.
Zero-Day Exploit is an vulnerability cause by the software makers haste in bringing software to market without fully testing for defects; as a result leaving the software expose to liability without a fix. According to Rouse (2010) zero-day exploit is one that takes advantage of a security vulnerability on the same day that the vulnerability becomes generally known (Rouse, 2010, para. 1).
Zero-day exploits have grown into a new technology market where security specialists are paid for discovering vulnerabilities in software and methods to halt the potential vulnerability in its software According to Simonite (2013) Zero-day exploit is a customizable software program used to infiltrate onto a computer system without detection by conventional computer security measures, such as antivirus packages or firewalls (Simonlite, 2013, para. 4). Zero-day exploits are used by hackers, cyber terrorist and social activist to steal credit card.sensitive information or to incite fear. Military...

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...sdirected to a site used to spread malware or spam on to a computer system. Even though policies have been administered to cover these problems users are can still make a mistake that can lead to possible harm on a network.

Works Cited

Chen, T.M. (2010, December) "Stuxnet, the real start of cyber warfare? [Editor's Note],"
Network, IEEE , 24(6), 2-3. doi: 10.1109/MNET.2010.5634434
Gjelten, T. (2013). First strike: US cyber warriors seize the offensive. Current, (552), 3-6.
Goral, K. (2013, June). Capture error | response crafting. Retrieved from http://responsecrafting.wordpress.com/tag/capture-error/ Rouse, M. (2010, July). What is zero-day exploit? - Definition from WhatIs.com. Retrieved from http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/zero-day-exploit Simonite, T. (2013). Welcome to the Malware-Industrial Complex. Technology Review, 116(3),
16-18.

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