Home featured Business Tech Featured IP Business Tech A two-step approach for SMBs to combat zero day threats Guest Author October 8, 2015 New security breaches are uncovered almost daily – any one of which can jeopardise your company, place your intellectual property at risk, and cause damage to your company’s bottom line and reputation. Cyber criminals are increasingly aggressive, well-funded and persistent, and these days, no company can ever be completely safe from the most determined attackers. Common cyber security measures generally revolve around strengthening infrastructure against incursions such as hacking attempts. However, these measures fail to take into account the risks presented by attacks exploiting new and unknown zero-day vulnerabilities. Zero day vulnerabilities are being used with increasing regularity and the time between discovery and the development of new attacks to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities is diminishing, making it harder to protect against them. These risks are compounded by the soft target in an organisation’s cyber defences presented by email. As a core business tool, email is a dependable and longstanding form of communication for organisations of all sizes, but remains the single most common and effective entry point for malicious software, or malware, much of which is designed to exploit zero day vulnerabilities. Cyber criminals can use a variety of relatively simple techniques to gain unauthorised entry into an internal network or system via an email. These include phishing, spear phishing, and whaling, all of which can help criminals acquire sensitive information to access networks, or infect a