A pair of reports from Mandiant and Google found a spike in zero-day vulnerabilities in 2021. The question is, why?
Zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits are typically thought of as uncommon and rarified hacking tools, but governments have been repeatedly shown to, and increased detection has revealed just how often attackers deploy them. Over the past three years, tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Apple have started to normalize the practice of noting when they're disclosing and fixing a vulnerability that was exploited before the patch release.
“There are definitely more zero-days being used than ever before,” he says. “The overall count last year for 2021 shot up, and there are probably a couple of factors that contributed, including the industry's ability to detect this. But there's also been a proliferation of these capabilities since 2012,” the year that Mandiant's report looks back to. “There's been a significant expansion in volume as well as the variety of groups exploiting zero-days,” he says.
For all types of actors, a lot of bread-and-butter hacking still involves exploiting vulnerabilities that became public long ago but haven't been patched consistently. Zero-days are still less common. But by tracking which zero-days have already been actively exploited, defenders can prioritize deploying certain patches and mitigations in the endless stream of updates that need to be done.
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