Almost 10 percent of IT assets are vulnerable to exploitation

eSentire has released its Q1 2019 Quarterly Threat Report which reveals that 8% of externally-facing IT assets are susceptible of being exploited by a high or critical severity vulnerability as classified by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) v3.0 used by the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

5 years ago Posted in

Between 2015 and 2019, data from exploit-db reveals that the number of distinct products with reported vulnerabilities has increased by 150 percent. Over this same period, the weaponization time for the creation of exploits to take advantage of these published vulnerabilities dropped from being several months to almost immediately. This drastic decrease in patching time has resulted in a situation where IT departments are faced with not having enough resources to identify and remediate critical vulnerabilities while having to continue to manage day-to-day business operations.

eSentire Threat Intelligence also observed that malicious traffic saw an almost 35 percent decline during the first quarter of 2019 when compared to the fourth quarter of 2018. This decline can be attributed to several factors including a reduced number of observed opportunistic exploitation campaigns and significant drop-off of coining malware detections which had seen a 1,500 percent increase in observations last year.

Additional Q1 2019 Quarterly Threat Report Findings:

The five most targeted industries are biotechnology, accounting, education, technology, and non-profits
Thursday the most popular day of the week for phishing attempts; with INTERAC, Facebook, and Microsoft being the most popular lures used
It took almost 40 hours for the majority of antivirus engines to be able to detect a new variant of Emotet malware
Over 60% of all malware enters businesses via email attachments

Almost 10 percent of IT assets are vulnerable to exploitation

89% of security leaders think traditional security approaches are failing in the face of modern threats

Lack of automated patch management a remote security risk

Clearlake Capital to acquire Quest Software

Dell Technologies and AWS collaborate

Aqua Security acquires Argon

79% of European businesses already seeing savings from shift to cloud security

Costs, cyberattacks and compliance - cause for concern

Renewable energy powers Zscaler