In a new report issued by the global internet security firm, Rapid 7, they have mapped the entire internet with regard to which nations in the world are most vulnerable to an attack by determined hackers. The company’s National Exposure Index created an infrared heat map of country’s internet system and servers looking for vulnerabilities; looking for those country’s servers whose front door is not only unlocked but wide open.
The report and the Index are a division of Rapid 7’s Project Sonar system which can map and read every IP address that is outward facing in a nation and discover what services are being supplied. The complete scan can be accomplished in just a few hours.
The more services offered by a server, the more vulnerable the whole system is to a hacking attack, Rapid 7 said. If certain services can’t connect to particular servers, they say, then they can’t be easily hacked. The services provide the open doors for the hackers. Open doors don’t necessarily mean a country will get hacked but of they have 20 or 30 open doors, the likelihood is far greater than if they only had a half dozen or so.
The lead researcher on the report, Tod Beardsley, said that, “We expected to find the most exposed countries were also the richest. The richest countries were most likely to have the most net connected devices which should mean they proportionally should have the most potential for damage. If you’re a rich country, you have a lot of internet. But we didn’t find any correlation between the number of nodes and the exposure.”
Countries such as Belgium, which came out at the top of the most vulnerable list, has far less nodes than, say, China, but the nodes they have are not all that secure. Database protocols are also important to Beardsley and Rapid 7. Many reasons can be shown for asking to connect to a system remotely, but doing so offers all kinds of instability and holes that can easily be exploited and data stolen by experienced hackers.
These are the top countries who have the greatest potential to have their internet system hacked:
1 – Belgium
2 – Tajikistan
3 – Samoa
4 – Australia
5 – China
6 – Hong Kong
7 – Dominican Republic
8 – Afghanistan
9 – South Africa
10 – Ethiopia
13 – France
14 – United States of America
16 – Japan
19 – Russia
23 – England
47 – Germany
50 – Vietnam
PHOTO CREDITS: The Guardian (London) / Pixabay