For the record, the original term "O-Day" was coined by a dyslexic
security engineer who listened to too much Harry Belafonte while working
all night on a drink of rum. It's true. Really.

t

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roland Kuhn [mailto:rkuhn (at) e18.physik.tu-muenchen (dot) de [email concealed]]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:58 AM
> To: Lamont Granquist
> Cc: Chad Perrin; Crispin Cowan; Casper.Dik (at) Sun (dot) COM [email concealed]; Gadi Evron; pdp
> (architect); bugtraq (at) securityfocus (dot) com [email concealed]; full-
> disclosure (at) lists.grok.org (dot) uk [email concealed]
> Subject: Re: 0day: PDF pwns Windows
>
> On 25 Sep 2007, at 00:57, Lamont Granquist wrote:
>
> > The exploit is not made public by its use. The exploit is not even
> > made public by (back-channel) sharing amongst the hacker/cracker
> > community. The exploit is only made public if detected or the
> > vulnerability is disclosed. Until detected/disclosed the hacker/
> > cracker can use their 31337 0day spl01tz to break into whichever
> > vulnerable machines they like. 0day exploits are valuable because
the
> > opposition is ignorant of them.
> >
> > Posting exploits to BUGTRAQ, however, inherently makes them not
> > 0day...
>
> And my ignorant self thought until this thread that the "0" in the
term
> referred to the number of days of head start granted to the vendor.
> Silly me. Because that would make all vulnerabilities published
without
> prior warning to the vendor a "0day"...
>
> Roland (who seems to remember that this was once the meaning of this
> term)

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