Southern states have the most open cyber exposures, report finds>
GCN – Gov Exec – Chris Teale
The 14 states in that region have more than 100,000 vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and data leaks that all must be addressed to prevent attacks, researchers found. The South also has 778 unpatched Known Exploited Vulnerabilities as defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to a joint study by cybersecurity companies Cyber Security Works (CSW), Ivanti, Cyware and Securin. Those KEVs have been exploited in the past and have federal guidelines for remediation.

Western states—an area researchers said constitutes 13 states including Alaska and Hawaii—have the highest number of assets and so have the largest attack surface. Researchers indicated there is much more to be done to identify and evaluate every threat. The report said that popular network scanners do not detect around 20 vulnerabilities typically associated with ransomware, while CISA’s KEV list has yet to add approximately 131 vulnerabilities associated with ransomware.
Link: https://gcn.com/cybersecurity/2023/02/southern-states-have-most-open-cyber-exposures-report-finds/383418/