Zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits dominate headlines and most heated information security discussions. In truth, however, there are relatively few of these attacks hitting a small number of hosts, according to new research on the subject.
The reason zero days eat up so much bandwidth is because of their effectiveness in compromising targets and avoiding detection. Researchers Leyla Bilge and Tudor Dumitras of Symantec Research Labs looked at period of malware activity on a host of Symantec detection platforms from 2008 to 2011 and quantified the window of exposure organizations face from attacks that are active before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed.
Link To The Study : http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~tdumitra/public_documents/bilge12_zero_day.pdf
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