Preventing unknown, zero-day attacks

Attacks from unknown threats pose critical risks to businesses. Unfortunately, they are also the hardest to prevent. That is why many businesses give up preventing them altogether. Some rely on event monitoring and threat hunting by security operations centre (SOC) teams to detect them after breaching their systems. But this is an ineffective strategy.

The strategic imperative for organisations is to prevent cyber attacks before they breach enterprise systems. Threats typically spread throughout networks in seconds, and it is frequently too late to detect and remediate threats once systems have been breached. By then, the system is already at the mercy of the attacker. Organisations will often have to spend a lot of time, money and other resources to clean up their systems after a breach. More often than not, the damage is already done.

This cyber security battle is won – or lost – depending on how well organisations prevent unknown, zero-day threats. Organisations need to adopt a proactive battle plan to stay ahead of cyber criminals and prevent attacks, not merely detect and remediate them. To win the cyber security battle, companies need strong threat intelligence, threat prevention technology and a consolidated security architecture that protects all attack vectors.