Where Only Fools Dare to Tread: An Empirical Study on the Prevalence of Zero-Day Malware

Zero-day malware is malware that is based on zero-day exploits and/or malware that is otherwise so new that it is not detected by any anti-virus or anti-malware scanners. This paper presents an empirical study that exposed updated Micsosoft Windows XP PCs with updated anti-virus software to a number of unsavoury Internet software repositories. A total of 124 zero-day malware instances were detected in our experiment. Our conclusion is that if a user is sufficiently adventurous (or foolish), no anti-virus protection can prevent a zero-day malware infection.