[Stupid WordPress. This was scheduled to publish Nov 23 but didn’t for some reason. Here it is, a bit late…]
On Friday, Maddie Stone from the Google P0 team Tweeted about the 0-day exploits her team tracks. As someone who checks that sheet weekly and tracks vulnerabilities, including ones ‘discovered in the wild’, this is a topic that is squarely in my tiny niche in the industry. Also, big fan of the P0 team!
I replied to her Tweet suggesting it come with a disclaimer that it didn’t represent “all” 0-days, rather they tracked high-end 0-day used primarily in “APT” attacks. Ben Hawkes, manager of the team, replied and agreed with that assessment. Before we proceed, let’s define 0-day real quick since the term is used for a variety of vulnerabilities, often incorrectly.
In this case, the context is a 0-day is a vulnerability that was actually found being exploited in the wild before there was public knowledge of it. In Risk Based Security’s VulnDB, we track that as “discovered in the wild“. Since VulnDB is comprehensive and our goal is to track every vulnerability, regardless of software or severity, we tend to aggregate a lot more than others. As of this post, we have over 78,000 vulnerabilities that aren’t found in CVE / NVD as a point of comparison. In my reply to Maddie I pointed out that we had seen 51 this year compared to their 22.
Next, Allen Householder replied to me asking a fun point, which is how many vulnerabilities did that really represent. Out of the 20,000+ vulnerabilities aggregated in 2020, we have 51 that are flagged as “discovered in the wild”. That represents only 0.25% of all vulnerabilities this year. One point I made previously is that Google’s team likely doesn’t care about a 0-day in the “Adning Advertising Plugin for WordPress” despite it being used to compromise WordPress blogs.
So with that number in mind, it goes back to the narrative that companies need to be scared of 0-days. They absolutely do! But… and this is the big qualifier that needs to come with that fear, is that perhaps they don’t need to be as afraid of 0-days as they do of already public vulnerabilities that they missed. With only 51 0-days in 2020, that means a vast majority of organizations simply aren’t likely to be targeted. Fully patching all known vulnerabilities that impact them should be priority one.
More to the point, vulnerabilities that have functional public exploits allowing anyone to trivially launch a viable attack are consistently a much bigger risk than the elusive 0-days. That is also one reminder of how often times CVSS falls short, if your vulnerability intelligence doesn’t provide Temporal scoring or exploit availability. Organizations making risk decisions only using the CVSS Base score are missing out on an important risk attribute.
I’ll end this blog with some arbitrary statistics around 0-days for fun! These are based on VulnDB data as of 11/21/2020. Note that metadata is less complete before 2012, which includes ‘discovered in the wild’ classification.
- 241,690 vulnerabilities, only 641 are 0days (0.27%)
- 14 are in Google products: Chrome (5), V8 (3), Android (6)
- 146 are in Microsoft products: Windows (63), IE (36)
- 13 are in Apple products
- 7 are in Oracle products: Java (4)
- 62 are in Adobe products: Flash (38), Reader (14)
- 18 are in security products 😞
- The oldest is from 1975 in RSTS/E! Yes, for real.
- The oldest you likely recognize is Sendmail in November, 1983