A new report that gathers threat intelligence data found that a significant portion of malware attacks taking place in Q4 of 2016 were zero-day exploits.
The quarterly report by network security firm WatchGuard features anonymized data from over 24,000 of the company’s unified threat management appliances worldwide. Any attacks not caught by legacy antivirus solutions were classified as “new or ‘zero-day’,” according to a recent release.
“This confirms that cybercriminals’ capability to automatically repack or morph their malware has outpaced the AV industry’s ability to keep up with new signatures,” wrote WatchGuard in the release.
The study also found that most network attacks in the quarter targeted web services and browsers, and that Javascript is a popular malware delivery and obfuscation mechanism.
