2006 - Year of zero-day attack

Security firm Websense said 2006 was the year of zero-day attacks, with the number of such attacks reaching a record high in security history.

Windows Metafile security flaw in Microsoft Windows operating system discovered in late 2005 marked the beginning of the year of zero-day attacks.

A series of other security flaws were discovered from zero-day attacks such as CreateText errors or Vector Mark-up Language errors (VML). All of those errors have put global users at risk of invisible attacks that can hit any time if they are careless.

In most cases, the security exploit code is widely distributed as soon as security errors are discovered and published. The consequence of this situation is that there are still many systems that have not yet installed the patches that have been attacked.

Websense statistics show that about 7% of Internet users worldwide use a browser that has not been fully patched.

Websense confirms that the number of security flaws that the manufacturer has released this year is the most in a few years.

Hoang Dung