This year has been the busiest in history for zero-day attacks, according to security vendor Websense.

The Windows Metafile attacks at the start of the year that carried over from late 2005, the CreateText attacks, and more recently, the Vector Mark-up Language (VML) attacks, all have contributed to the situation.

All of these vulnerabilities were being actively exploited in the wild long before patches were released to address the vulnerabilities, says Websense.

In most cases, Proof-of-Concept (POC) exploit code gets released in conjunction with, or shortly after, zero-day announcements are made. This usually results in months of copy-cat attacks that still work well against un-patched machines.
Websense says it is not uncommon to see web exploit code that is utilising vulnerabilities that were patched years ago.

A recent investigation into Websense’s web server logs revealed that around seven per cent of all visitors to their web site were using a browser that was vulnerable to some sort of attack.

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