As a PhD student my main topic was the period of time just after the disclosure of a vulnerability. This is the most threatening stage of its life cycle as miti

As a PhD student my main topic was the period of time just after the disclosure of a vulnerability. This is the most threatening stage of its life cycle as mitigations are not disseminated in the community yet (a patch may be available but nobody installed it yet, etc.). We struggled to find a commonly accepted term for vulnerabilities at this stage of their life cycle, but we finally settled on n-day vulnerability. This term have been relatively well accepted by the vulnerability research community. The exact length of this period is completely dependent on the velocity of the community to adopt a mitigation such as a patch. Heartbleed and Shellshock had been massively mitigated in a matter of days or weeks, but EternalBlue based-attacks still caught a lot of production systems off-guard more than a year after its disclosure.