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National / Industry / Cloud Exposure Report (NICER) 2020 by Rapid7

  • 1.  National / Industry / Cloud Exposure Report (NICER) 2020 by Rapid7

    Posted Jul 26, 2020 01:01:00 AM
    Edited by Olivier Caleff Jul 27, 2020 12:27:29 AM

    Rapid7 just released the 2020 National / Industry / Cloud Exposure Report (NICER) report

    It is a comprehensive census of Internet-based cyber-exposure and highlights Cloud Exposure.

    Excerpt

    Key findings presented in the report
    • A technical assessment of the 24 service protocols surveyed finds that, on the whole, unencrypted, cleartext protocols are still the rule, rather than the exception, on how information flows around the world, with 42% more plaintext HTTP servers than HTTPS, 3 million databases awaiting insecure queries, and 2.9 million routers, switches, and servers accepting Telnet connections.
    • Patch and update adoption continues to be slow, even for modern services with reports of active exploitation. This is particularly true in the areas of email handling and remote console access where, for example, 3.6 million SSH servers are sporting versions between five and 14 years old.
    • The top publicly traded companies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Japan are hosting a surprisingly high number of unpatched services with known vulnerabilities, especially in financial services and telecommunications, which each have ~10,000 high-rated CVEs across their public-facing assets. Despite their vast collective reservoirs of wealth and expertise, this level of vulnerability exposure is unlikely to get better in a time of global recession.
    • One bit of positive news was that we found the population of insecure services has gone down over the past year, with an average 13% decrease in exposed, dangerous services such as SMB, Telnet, and rsync, crushing the doom-and-gloom predicted jump of newly exposed insecure services such as Telnet and SMB, despite the sudden shift to work-at-home for millions of people and the continued rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices crowding residential networks.
    While the sky most certainly is not falling, we are not suggesting that the status quo is okay. Far from it. We encourage organizations, legislators, regulators, infrastructure providers, and standards-bearers to use this document as a both a reference (for mostly what not to do) and a catalyst for innovation and experimentation that will help make the internet a safer place for discourse, learning, and commerce.
    [...]
    Why We Focused on Clouds
    An ever-increasing percentage of mission-critical business workloads are moving to cloud environments for all the reasons every bit of advertising you receive about the benefits of "the cloud" have told you a million times already, so we won't bore or annoy you by re-enumerating them. With providers such as Amazon and Microsoft each having a customer base exposing services across over a million IPv4s (each), the research team felt it was important to dig into what portion of services in our survey came from cloud environments. We chose the cloud providers we did based on IPv4 allocated capacity, discovered usage, and which ones were more prevalent in the context of real business use (versus hobbyist use)
    Where possible, we used official lists provided by providers and augmented these with known mappings from provisioned autonomous systems. While we have strived for completeness, IPv4 entity mapping even in cloud space is less than a precise science

    Links

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    #Report
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    Olivier Caleff - CSA French Chapter - Chapter Leader - [email protected] - https://CloudSecurityAlliance.fr
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