How hackers are targeting enterprises from the outside

In the past businesses have needed to worry about protecting their networks. But the expansion of internet use, cloud and as-a-service products means there are now more potential threats to worry about.

A new study from attack surface management specialist RiskIQ looks at the digital presence of organizations, where they lack visibility, and the pathways hackers are using to exploit these blind spots.

The research uses RiskIQ's collection technology, which extracts terabytes of internet data to map the billions of relationships between internet-exposed infrastructure worldwide to assess digital risk.

"Today, organisations are responsible for defending not only their internal network but also their digital presence across the internet and the cloud," says Lou Manousos, RiskIQ's CEO. "Bringing the massive scope of an organisation's attack surface into focus helps frame the challenges of extending cybersecurity outside the corporate firewall, especially as staff forced to work from home in response to COVID-19 push that boundary farther out."

In order to defend themselves effectively brands need to understand what they look like from the outside. The report looked at the attack surfaces of FTSE-30 companies and found each organization had, on average, 324 expired certificates and 46 Web frameworks with known vulnerabilities.

RiskIQ also observed 2,959,498 new domains (211,392 per day) and 772,786,941 new hosts (55,199,067) across the internet over two weeks, each representing a possible target for threat actors. It identified 21,496 phishing domains across 478 unique brands too.

So far in 2020, RiskIQ has detected 2,552 Magecart attacks or 425 instances of Magecart per month. Plus in 2019, RiskIQ discovered 170,796 blacklisted mobile apps across 120 mobile app stores and the open internet.

The full report is available from the RiskIQ site.

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