Hackers working for governments were responsible for the majority of attributed zero-day exploits used in real-world cyberattacks last year, per new research from Google. From a report: Google’s report said that the number of zero-day exploits — referring to security flaws that were unknown to the software makers at the time hackers abused them — had dropped from 98 exploits in 2023 to 75 exploits in 2024.
But the report noted that of the proportion of zero-days that Google could attribute — meaning identifying the hackers who were responsible for exploiting them — at least 23 zero-day exploits were linked to government-backed hackers. Among those 23 exploits, 10 zero-days were attributed to hackers working directly for governments, including five exploits linked to China and another five to North Korea.
