Published : 6 years ago, on 13/07/2018

New report details five ways hackers are cashing in on organisations’ lack of visibility into their internet presence

RiskIQ, the global leader in digital threat management, today released a report mining the company’s massive repository of internet data. The report maps the global internet attack surface over a two-week period, and in the process, reveals the true extent of the modern corporate attack surface.

The report, ‘The anatomy of an attack surface: Five ways hackers are cashing in’ is a data-driven exploration of five different approaches hackers take to target businesses via the internet. They capitalise on the weakening of the corporate perimeter due to customer and partner interactions moving online. The report is based on data collected by RiskIQ’s web-crawling infrastructure, which each day executes and analyses more than two billion HTTP requests, takes in terabytes of passive DNS data, collects millions of SSL Certificates, and monitors millions of mobile apps. When viewed as a whole, this data gives a new perspective of the sheer number of digital assets exposed to the internet, any of which could become a target for hackers.

“Today, organisations are responsible for defending their network all the way to the edges of the internet,” said Lou Manousos, RiskIQ CEO. “Bringing the massive scope of an organisation’s attack surface into focus helps frame the challenges faced by organisations in keeping their employees, customers, and brand safe.”

By showing what their organisation looks like from an attacker’s perspective—a collection of digital assets that are discoverable by hackers—the report illustrates that today’s security teams are not only responsible for their own network, but also everything that targets their brand and assets on the open internet. When brands understand what they look like from the outside-in, they can begin developing a digital threat management program that allows them to discover everything associated with their organisation on the internet, both legitimate and malicious.

Report highlights include:

1. The Global Attack Surface is much bigger than you think: RiskIQ observed 3,495,267 new domains (249,662 per day) and 77,252,098 new hosts (5,518,007 per day) across the internet over a two week period, each representing a possible target for threat actors.
2. Sometimes hackers know more about your attack surface than you do: Looking at the attack surfaces of FT30 companies, each organisation had on average 120 websites with a potential critical Vulnerability or Exposure (CVE) and 228 websites with a potential high CVE.
3. The hidden attack surface: Hackers don’t have to compromise your assets to attack your organisation or your customers: In Q1 2018, RiskIQ identified 26,671 phishing domains impersonating 299 unique brands
4. The mobile attack surface: You have much more to worry about than just the Apple and Google Play mobile app stores: RiskIQ discovered 21,948 blacklisted mobile apps across 120 mobile app stores and the open internet.
5. Cryptocurrency Miners are the latest attack surface compromise: RiskIQ found 50,000+ websites have been observed running Coinhive in the past year.

To view the rest of these stats, download the report here:https://www.riskiq.com/research/anatomy-of-an-attack-surface/?alt=1&utm_campaign=anatomy_attack_surface&utm_source=pr&utm_medium=website&utm_content=attack_surface_resource_pr