Uses of zero-day attacks can include infiltrating malware, spyware or allowing unwanted access to user information. The term "zero-day" refers to the unknown nature of the hole to those outside of the hackers, specifically, the developers. Once the vulnerability becomes known, a race begins for the developer, who must protect users.

According to the cybersecurity firm, globally advanced attackers continued to breach networks with highly-targeted spear-phishing attacks, which increased a total of eight percent in 2014.

"What makes last year particularly interesting is the precision of these attacks which used 20 per cent fewer emails to successfully reach their targets and incorporated more drive-by malware downloads and other web-based exploits," it said.

According to the research, last year India moved up five places to become the 16th most bot-infected country worldwide.

"However, despite higher security awareness, the Indian metros reported close to 65 per cent of infections across cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Cochin, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi."

"Countries that have a high number of bot-infected machines are often a source for Distributed Denial of Service attacks that attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources," the research revealed.

Read Also:

India at UN: Technology Is 'Golden Key' For Planetary Sustainability

India Role Model in Space Science Benefiting Common Man: Ex- ISRO Chief