SiliconAngle reports that 85% of organizations across eight of nine industries have left their remote desktop protocol connections exposed to the internet for at least a quarter of a month, increasing their susceptibility to brute-force and ransomware attacks.
Moreover, month-long RDP exposures were observed across a median of financial services organizations and state or local government entities, according to a Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 report. The report also showed that most remote code execution vulnerabilities have been exploited by threat actors within eight weeks of disclosure.
Cloud environments accounted for 80% of security exposures, with almost 50% of high-risk exposures in the cloud brought upon by the continuous replacement of leveraged cloud services, said the report. Researchers also found that the cloud was noted to have over 75% of publicly accessible software development infrastructure exposures.
The findings suggest a major attack surface management issue across organizations but lacking visibility has hindered awareness.
