By Adam Kilgore,
Publication Date: 2026-10-08 15:00:00
With Anantha Srinivasan and Sundarram Paravastu
Zero-day exploits have always posed a significant challenge for organizations, and the focus is even sharper given the rise of AI-based vulnerability discovery and AI-based tools that facilitate faster exploitation and more sophisticated attacks, even by less sophisticated attackers. While most of the focus is rightly placed on protecting assets from zero-day exploits, it is also critical to determine whether a host was compromised before patches or other mitigations were implemented. Organizations can no longer assume that a lack of current alerts means a clean bill of health; they must actively interrogate their own past.
However, assessing whether a zero-day vulnerability was exploited in the past essentially involves going back in time. Relying on standard logs or “Conditional / Selective PCAP” systems during a zero-day investigation leaves the Security Operations Center (SOC) team blind. NetFlow, Syslog, and firewall logs…
