A new study found that over half of the Fortune 500 are regularly exposed to remote access hacks. A majority of these occur via remote working features that are rarely considered vulnerabilities. The study also found that these attacks happened regardless of the company’s technical expertise or cybersecurity budget.
It is not surprising that more than half of Fortune 500 companies have been exposed to remote access hacks, suffering an RDP exposure over a two-week period scanning for open RDP ports. Workforce mobility is the new norm and, beyond corporate provisioned devices, employees want to use their device of choice. This introduces new attack vectors for ransomware as well as other endpoint security, data leakage and compliance risks. While productivity is paramount, enterprises must up-level the remote and mobile access defense closest to the user and device. A recent 2019 State Enterprise Secure Access report by IDG showed that of 300 global enterprises surveyed, malware (55%) and unauthorized or vulnerable endpoint use (52%) were the top two access security incidents with significant to high impact. These high-impact security risks can be prevented with a modern Zero Trust secure access solutions which offer active security posture features to ensure malware protection is installed, active and up-to-date prior to RDP-based access.