2019 edgescan vulnerability Stats report

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Measure, so we can improve.


 Its been a while since I've blogged anything due to lack of anything meaningful to say or the fact that few people actually want to listen :) but anyways... I've been working on the 2019 edgescan Vulnerability Stats report which always gives me joy as I find it very interesting to see a real picture of the vulnerability landscape based on the clients we humbly serve via our edgescan SaaS.

 Currently we assess thousands of web applications and hundreds of thousands of endpoints, all under continuous/on-demand cyber security assessment. 
Industries such as finance, government, media, pharma, retail, energy, legal all served by our SaaS but the result makes for some good reading when you look into the statistics of vulnerability.

App layer is where the risk lives:

In 2018 we discovered that on average, 19% of all vulnerabilities were associated with (Layer 7) web applications, API’s, etc., and 81% were network vulnerabilities.

The Risk Density is still high and has not changed significantly from last years report. 

Even though we find more vulnerabilities in the Infrastructure layer the risk is certainly living in the application layer. This is due to the “snowflake effect”; every application is unique, developed in a stand alone fashion and serves a unique purpose as opposed to infrastructure which is commoditised and much more uniform.

Change and uniqueness certainly introduces additional risk. Internal, non public application layer security is worse; 24.9% of all discovered vulnerabilities are High or Critical Risk.



 "Zeroday" Vulnerabilities are a myth for most part:

Most of the vulnerabilities discovered are from between 2011 and 2015. Believe it or not, the majority of vulnerabilities discovered out there are between four and seven years old. According the the Verizon DBiR (2018) the majority of breaches are also as a result of exploitation of old, known vulnerabilities!!

Vulnerability Taxonomy

The most common issues relate to client-side security such as XSS and JavaScript Injection attacks. Vulnerable components are also significantly high as 12.35% followed by weak authentication at 9.25% of all discovered vulnerabilities.


2018's most common Infrastructure Vulnerabilities

No surprise SSL/TLS issues top the chart as the most common discovered vulnerability in 2018. In recent years SSL /TLS has taken a battering, with many implementation and design weaknesses exposed. SMB security issues were also very common. What is worrisome here is a decent amount of the SMB issues discovered were in relation to CVE2017-0144, CVE-2017-0145 (EternalBlue/NotPetya/Wannacry) malware.


More deeper detail about the above and other issues shall be discussed in the forthcoming 2019 Vulnerability Stats Report - Coming soon!

 Update: you can download the report here:
https://www.edgescan.com/company/vulnerability-stats/

 Media Coverage:
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/web-application-security/
https://www.scmagazineuk.com/80-enterprise-systems-feature-unpatched-cve-vulnerabilities/article/1526226

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