UK firms are hosting a high number of unpatched services with known vulnerabilities, reveals Rapid7

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A report by Rapid7, titled National Industry Cloud Exposure Report (NICER), found that financial services companies are hosting a high number of unpatched services with known vulnerabilities. The report reveals known vulnerabilities in the financial services and telecommunications industry. It showed that patch and update adoption continues to be slow, coupled with the heavy use of unencrypted and cleartext protocols.

The report also offers a data-backed analysis of the changing internet risk landscape, measuring the prevalence and geographic distribution of commonly known exposures in the interconnected technologies that shape our world.

Tod Beardsley, research director at Rapid7, said, “Financial services companies are often some of the biggest targets to cyber attackers. One thing shocks me is the prevalence of un-securable SMB servers that exist within these organisations, showing that UK organisations have not learned the lessons of WannaCry, which cost the NHS more than £92 million a couple of years ago. My advice to IT teams within financial services organisations is to bake in regular patching windows and decommissioning schedules to their internet-facing infrastructure.”

According to Rapid7, each of the findings in the report are broken down by country, industry sector, and protocol, with individual sections on the effect of the pandemic and technological shifts like the movement to the cloud. This is expected to help diagnose what is vulnerable, what is improving or getting worse, and what solutions are available for policymakers, business leaders, and innovators to make the internet more secure.