According to Palo Alto’s Unit 42 threat intelligence group, attackers have an average of six days to exploit unmitigated vulnerabilities before security teams resolve them. This is despite research demonstrating that hackers start exploiting flaws within hours or even minutes of a new security alert being disclosed.
Unit 42 has found that attackers are becoming more adept at exploiting not just unpatched vulnerabilities but also common issues such as weak credentials and lack of authentication.
Although worldwide end-user spending on cloud computing is projected to grow to $592 billion this year, Unit 42’s analysis of workloads in 210,000 cloud accounts across 1,300 organizations shows that important lessons about security are not being learned, remembered, or applied.
Three-quarters of organizations do not enforce multifactor authentication for console users, and researchers found sensitive data in 63% of publicly exposed buckets.
The report also reveals that just 5% of security rules trigger 80% of alerts, suggesting that every organization has a small set of risky behaviors that are repeatedly observed in their cloud workloads.
Unit 42 attributes this recurrence to IT and security teams’ reliance on ready-to-use templates and default configurations, which can compound basic errors or problems. Nearly two-thirds of the codebases in production have unpatched vulnerabilities rated as high or critical in severity, making it easier for attackers to gain initial access to a victim organization’s internal IT environment.
Unit 42’s report highlights that new vulnerabilities can emerge at any time, and a single vulnerability can be propagated to multiple cloud workloads due to software dependency.
This underscores the fact that no matter how secure the underlying cloud infrastructure is, vulnerable applications in the cloud can open up potential attack vectors.
