Zero-day? What’s that?
I’ve been reading security reports for a while now, and there is this term that comes up quite often: “Zero-day”. I’ve never looked up the definition, I always thought it meant “critical vulnabrility”, but the definition is pretty simple.
A zero-day exploit is simply an exploit that is taken advantage of the day it is made known to the world.
The difference between this type of exploit and others is that oftentimes, when a exploit is discovered the software company has some time to release a fix and patch systems, before the crackers learn of how to attack the vunerability. With a zero-day exploit, the crackers have the distinct edge and start attacking systems before the patch has begun development.