Managing Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In The Real World

Uploaded on 2024-12-11 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW

For developers and DevSecOps teams, nothing can ruin a day, week or even month quite like a zero-day vulnerability. The term itself highlights how little time a vendor has to respond once discovered, making it easy to see how zero-day vulnerabilities can cause such panic.

Zero-day vulnerabilities represent a challenging, and sometimes critical, threat for organisations, and managing these risks in a busy DevSecOps environment can be overwhelming.

Even worse, they’re a frequent occurrence, with over 900 vulnerabilities identified by Snyk in October alone – meaning it’s not a case of if software creators need to deal with such a threat, but when.

Thankfully, there are steps your teams can take to mitigate zero-day vulnerabilities during times of non-emergency, helping them to jump into action when the worst happens. With the right mindset and tools, there are ways to find and fix security vulnerabilities as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, helping organisations avoid falling victim.

Embrace A Security-First Mindset

Security applies at every phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and should be at the forefront of developers’ minds as they implement the software’s requirements. A security-first mindset puts the security team in a better position to collaborate with developers, ensuring security is a shared responsibility across the organisation.

Thus, organisations should train their developers to understand security fundamentals and appoint security champions in each team. A security champion is someone who can engage directly with the security team and be responsible for bridging the dev-security gap. This includes educating the engineering team in secure development, adding and improving security checks in the developer workflow, questioning where decisions don’t include security, giving the security team visibility into the practices and state of the development team they are in. Ultimately, they allow security to ‘shift left’, moving to the earliest stages of the development cycle, as opposed to very late in the process where time, costs, and pain to remediate all mount up.

Additionally, security awareness initiatives and upskilling programmes should be a core investment for organisations.

Of course, developers can’t be expected to take on an entirely new, additional professional skill set, but a solid developer security platform can make a huge difference in filling in the gaps between development and cybersecurity. It’s critical that all stakeholders, from developers to business leaders, understand the risks associated with zero-day vulnerabilities and their role in mitigating them. This can encourage transparent communication about vulnerabilities and remediation processes, which is key to fostering a security-first mindset.

Shift Left To Fix Vulnerabilities

A shift-left approach enables developers to identify and fix vulnerabilities throughout the development process, rather than waiting on traditional methods that include code being sent back and forth between developers, security and operations teams.

By investing in developer-friendly security tools, development teams are empowered to become the first line of defence against zero-day vulnerabilities, eliminating unnecessary delays later in the process. This proactive approach ensures that code is checked for issues at every stage of development, with the latest security platforms offering up-to-date security data that includes the very latest zero-day vulnerability information.

Such tools can make a big difference for DevSecOps teams, offering integrated security analysis during coding and ensuring that security checks become an integral part of the development process. Not only can this help to limit code that accidentally introduces vulnerabilities to production systems, it can also help to minimise the impact of any security breaches with strong visibility and documentation.

Adopt A Comprehensive Scanning Tool

A vulnerability scanning tool that continuously monitors code, dependencies and software-based infrastructure is essential, helping DevSecOps teams to catch zero-day vulnerabilities early. The right tools can help your teams to automate vulnerability detection in open-source libraries, containers and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This enables development teams to receive real-time feedback and prioritise fixing vulnerabilities before they become significant threats. Because zero-day vulnerabilities are unpredictable, automated scanning offers an effective line of defence by catching issues as soon as they are introduced.

Many organisations fall short by only scanning their code intermittently, a practice which is particularly susceptible to zero-day attacks as scans only find known vulnerabilities. Don’t do this. DevSecOps teams need to ensure constant vigilance across the software development lifecycle. The best security platforms offer integrations that enable scanning throughout the CI/CD pipeline – a best practice that ensures vulnerabilities are addressed early and continuously. With AI power, this can also happen faster than ever.

Invest In Patch Management & Incident Response

The time between discovering a zero-day vulnerability and deploying a solution, potentially in the form of a patch or rolling back to older versions of software without the vulnerability, is a critical window. The faster organisations can react, the better their chances of mitigating attacks, with CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report revealing an average breakout time for interactive eCrime intrusion activity of 62 minutes last year, down from 84. A skilled attacker may break into enterprise environments in single-digit minutes.

Automating patch management through dedicated security tools can significantly reduce downtime, and maintaining visibility and strong defences helps muster a ‘defence in depth’.

Companies should develop a clear, well-documented incident response plan (IRP) to handle zero-day incidents effectively. This involves cross-functional collaboration between development, security, and operations teams to ensure swift action. Security teams should also monitor threat intelligence channels for emerging zero-day exploits and implement temporary fixes like firewall rules until patches are available.

Leverage Threat Intelligence

It’s also important that organisations leverage threat intelligence platforms. Such platforms aggregate data on known vulnerabilities, emerging exploits and potential threats, helping them to provide effective real-time insights into active attacks. This enables organisations to proactively defend against potential zero-day exploits.

By integrating threat intelligence with existing security workflows, your DevSecOps teams can benefit from early warnings about vulnerabilities and begin to roll out mitigation strategies even before a formal patch is available. Many security platforms provide detailed security advisories that enable developers to quickly act on relevant threats.

Take Every Step You Can To Mitigate Risk

By their very nature, zero-day vulnerabilities will continue to pose a significant risk to any organisation, and it’s never possible to remove risk entirely. With the right tools, practices and cultural shifts highlighted above, however, your teams can build a more resilient defence strategy. This not only protects against immediate risks, but also future-proofs your organisation against evolving threats.

In the real world, ‘forewarned is forearmed’, and forearmed prepares your teams for action.

Randall Degges is Head of Developer Relations at Snyk

Image: Unpslash

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