ExtraHop Benchmarking Cyber Risk and Readiness Report Highlights Prevalence and Risks of Internet-Exposed Protocols on Organizations’ Networks

More than 60% of organizations expose remote control protocol SSH to the public internet, while 36% of organizations expose the insecure FTP protocol. SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ExtraHop, the leader in cloud-native network intelligence, today released findings from the ExtraHop Benchmarking Cyber Risk and Readiness report showing that a significant percentage of organizations expose insecure or highly sensitive protocols, including SMB, SSH, and Telnet, to the public internet. In the new report, ExtraHop conducted an analysis of enterprise IT environments to benchmark the cybersecurity posture of organizations based on open ports and sensitive protocol exposure so that security and IT leaders can assess their risk posture and attack surface visibility relative to other organizations.

SSH is the Most Exposed Sensitive Protocol: Secure Shell (SSH) is a well-designed protocol with good cryptography for securely accessing remote devices. Sixty-four percent of organizations have at least one device exposing this protocol to the public internet. With 41% of organizations having at least one device exposing LDAP to the public internet, this sensitive protocol has an outsized risk factor. Twenty-four percent of organizations have at least one device exposing Tabular Data Stream (TDS) to the public internet. Thirty-one percent of organizations have at least one device exposing Server Message Block (SMB) to the public internet. While there are at least two secure alternatives, 36% of organizations expose at least one device using this protocol to the public internet. Yet 12% of organizations have at least one device exposing this protocol to the public internet.