Valve's popular PC gaming platform Steam is vulnerable to a zero-day security vulnerability which could leave 72m Windows users at risk of having their systems taken over by an attacker who could then install malware, steal data, compromise passwords and more.

The vulnerability was disclosed by a security researcher named Vasily Kravets just 45 days after submitting his report on the matter to Valve.

Typically researchers wait 90 days before publicly disclosing a vulnerability as it gives the affected businesses time to fix the vulnerabilities in their software.

Kravets discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability which could allow an attacker with minimal user permissions to gain the same levels of access as the system admin.

A threat actor could take advantage of this by launching malware using those raised privileges.

Kravets explained just how serious the vulnerability is, saying:

Preventing zero-day attack, one of a developer’s worst nightmares.

In this guide, we’ll tackle the A to Zs of these attacks.Keeping your software bug-free and challenging to compromise is one of the biggest challenges that you will ever face as a developer.For every person that wants to see you succeed in this world, it feels as if there are ten shady characters behind the scenes trying to crack your creation and compromise it.Zero-day attacks prevention is perhaps the most critical aspect of keeping software from being exploited.What is a Zero-Day Attack?Before addressing how you can prevent a zero-day attack from occurring, let’s take a look at what exactly they are.

A zero-day exploit is one that exists in the code undetected by the developer.Zero-day exploits are a mistake with the underlying code of a program, and they are a complicated matter for even the most experienced of software developers.

Since these flaws can remain dormant since the start, they are always posing a danger as no piece of software is perfect.Also Read: How To Perform External Black-box Penetration Testing in Organization with “ZERO” InformationWays That These Exploits are DiscoveredTo understand zero-day prevention, it is essential to have an idea of how these exploits are found in the first place.

Let’s go over some of the most popular techniques that are used to discover zero-day exploits and then eliminate them.Using StatisticsMethods that use statistics to discover exploits tend to be the most common since they use data to determine the most likely faults in the code.

Since past exploits are used to find issues, statistics tend to be less likely to discover new issues that have never been faced beforeSignature DetectionThis form of exploit detection tends to be a little more complex than statistics-based methods.