As just one symptom, 83 percent of the Top 30 U.S. retailers have vulnerabilities which pose an “imminent” cyber-threat, including Amazon, Costco, Kroger and Walmart.
2020 is shaping up to be a banner year for software vulnerabilities, leaving security professionals drowning in a veritable sea of patching, reporting and looming attacks, many of which they can’t even see.
A trio of recent reports tracking software vulnerabilities over the past year underscore the challenges of patch management and keeping attacks at bay.
“Based on vulnerability data, the state of software security remains pretty dismal,” Brian Martin, vice president of vulnerability intelligence with Risk Based Security (RBS), told Threatpost.
Security researchers looked at CVE details across the Top 50 software vendors and found that since 1999, Microsoft is the hands-down leader with 6,700 reported, followed by Oracle with 5,500 and IBM with 4,600.
“New software is being released at a faster rate than old software is being deprecated or discontinued,” Comparitech’s Paul Bischoff told Threatpost. “Given that, I think more software vulnerabilities are inevitable. Most of those vulnerabilities are identified and patched before they’re ever exploited in the wild, but more zero days are inevitable as well. Zero days are a much bigger concern than vulnerabilities in general.”
Source: Record Levels of Software Bugs Plague Short-Staffed IT Teams in 2020
