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“One reason you’re seeing more now is because we’re finding more,” says Microsoft’s Doerr. “We’re better at shining a spotlight. You can now learn from what’s going on with all your customers, helping you get smarter faster. In the worst case where you see something new, it will affect one customer instead of 10,000.”
But reality is much more complex than theory. Earlier this year, multi hack groupLaunched attacks against Microsoft Exchange email servers. What started out as a critical zero-day attack, in a nutshell worse in the period after a fix becomes available, but before it is actually applied to users. This gap is a sweet spot that hackers love to hit.
But as a rule, Doerr is in place.
Exploits are getting harder and more valuable
While zero days are more common than ever, there’s one fact all experts agree on: they’re getting harder and more expensive to achieve.
Better defenses and more sophisticated systems mean hackers have to do more to break into a target than they did a decade ago; attacks cost more and require more resources. But the payoff is that with so many companies running in the cloud, a security vulnerability can leave millions of customers vulnerable to attack.
“Ten years ago, when everything was in-house, only one company could see most of the attacks,” Doerr says, “and very few companies were equipped to understand what was going on.”
Faced with defense improvement, hackers often have to link multiple exploits together rather than using a single exploit. These “chains of exploitation” require more zero days. The success in detecting these chains is part of the reason for the sharp increase in numbers.
Today, says Dowd, attackers “have to invest more and take more risks by owning these chains to achieve their goals.”
An important signal comes from the rising cost of the most valuable exploits. Limited data available, e.g. Zerodium’s public zero-day prices, shows up 1,150% increase at the expense of top hacks in the last three years.
But even though zero-day attacks were more difficult, demand increased and supply followed. The sky may not be falling, but it’s not exactly a sunny day either.
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