Internet hygiene still stinks despite botnet and ransomware flood

Millions of must-be-firewalled services sitting wide open

Network security has improved little over the last 12 months – millions of vulnerable devices are still exposed on the open internet, leaving them defenceless to the next big malware attack.

A follow-up audit by Rapid7 – the firm behind the Metasploit pen-testing tool – found that more than a million endpoints were confirmed as exposing Microsoft file sharing services (Server Message Block, TCP port 445). The majority (800,000) of these systems were on Windows, leaving a target-rich environment for WannaCrypt, the ransomware worm that infected many NHS hospitals and enterprise targets worldwide last month. The SMB SYN scan results increased by 17 per cent this year compared to the same audit last year (4.7 million to 5.5 million nodes).

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