Enterprises Sinking Under 100+ Critical Flaws Per Day
Enterprises are forced to deal with an estimated 100+ critical vulnerabilities each day, with Flash and Microsoft Office accounting for the majority of top app flaws, according to new research from Tenable.
The security vendor analyzed anonymized data from 900,000 vulnerability assessments across 2100 enterprises to compile its latest Vulnerability Intelligence Report.
It predicted that the industry is set to disclose 19,000 new vulnerabilities this year, up 27% from last year — although other estimates put the 2017 figure at nearly 20,000.
Other stats from the Tenable report highlighted the increasing challenge facing system administrators tasked with prioritizing patches.
It claimed that, on average, an enterprise finds 870 vulnerabilities per day across 960 assets, with 61% listed as high severity. Yet just 7% have public exploits available, making it difficult to know which of the remaining 93% to fix first, the firm argued.
That’s especially true when one considers that many hackers deliberately target older vulnerabilities that may have been forgotten about.
Out of the 20 application vulnerabilities affecting the largest number of enterprises, several came from 2015.
Half of that top 20 related to Adobe Flash bugs, followed by Microsoft Office at 20%, with the eight top web browser CVEs from Google and Microsoft impacting 20-30% of enterprises on a single day.
“When everything is urgent, triage fails. As an industry, we need to realize that effective reduction in cyber risk starts with effective prioritization of issues,” said Tom Parsons, senior director of product management, Tenable.
“To keep up with the current volume and velocity of new vulnerabilities, organizations need actionable insight into where their greatest exposures lie; otherwise, remediation is no more than a guessing game. This means organizations need to focus on vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited by threat actors rather than those that could only theoretically be used.”
This post Enterprises Sinking Under 100+ Critical Flaws Per Day originally appeared on InfoSecurity Magazine.
