Systematic Review of Current Approaches and Innovative Solutions for Combating Zero-Day Vulnerabilities and Zero-Day Attacks

Ensuring robust cybersecurity in technological ecosystems involves addressing security vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. Although these two are closely related, they must be examined separately because the approaches and solutions for addressing them are quite different. Both security vulnerabilities and cyberattacks can be divided into the known and zero-day categories. This paper presents a systematic review that focuses on combating zero-day vulnerabilities and zero-day attacks. First, we established a taxonomy of current approaches and solutions for combating security vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. The focus was then shifted to zero-day threats. Zero-day solutions recently proposed in open-access articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database were systematically analyzed. We searched for answers to the research questions of this systematic review, using inferences drawn from the reviewed articles. We examined the most adopted approaches, the most employed solutions, and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the reviewed articles to answer the research questions.