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The Internet Is A Threat Vector For All Sizes Of Organizations

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The Internet is a threat vector for all sizes of organizations, whether private or public. New technologies are constantly being introduced in order to keep pace with industry trends and with these new technologies come new vulnerabilities. Many of these vulnerabilities among software will be discovered in the testing phases or early days of release, however, there are some vulnerabilities that will remain unknown to the masses. These unknown vulnerabilities, once discovered, become the pathway for a zero-day exploits (Zetter, 2015). The term zero-day does not have a specific definition but it is often referred to as the amount of time that the IT community has to the newly implemented attack (Kliarsky, 2011). Zero-day exploits are used to open secret doors into user systems and since they are unknown to antivirus companies as well they may go undetected for years, and are often times discovered by accident (Zetter, 2015). Some of the most recent and highly publicized attacks that used zero-day threats as essential elements to the attacks are APT, Aurora, Night Dragon, and probably the most widely known to the general public is Stuxnet (Kliarsky, 2011). Private use of zero-day exploits The discovery, acquiring, and selling of zero-day exploits can be a highly profitable business for private companies. For example in September 2015, a security startup firm Zerodium announced that they would pay $1 million to anyone that could develop a “jailbreak” for the iPhone. Two

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