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Before we knew it

Published 15 October 2012
Leyla Bilge, Tudor Dumitraş
Citations608

TL;DR

This paper describes a method for automatically identifying zero-day attacks from field-gathered data that records when benign and malicious binaries are downloaded on 11 million real hosts around the world and identifies 18 vulnerabilities exploited before disclosure.

Abstract

Little is known about the duration and prevalence of zero-day attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities that have not been disclosed publicly. Knowledge of new vulnerabilities gives cyber criminals a free pass to attack any target of their choosing, while remaining undetected. Unfortunately, these serious threats are difficult to analyze, because, in general, data is not available until after an attack is discovered. Moreover, zero-day attacks are rare events that are unlikely to be observed in honeypots or in lab experiments.

Keywords

Computer Science