Nearly Half of Businesses Surveyed by Pwnie Express Say They Don’t Thoroughly Assess Security at Remote and Branch Locations
Boston, Massachusetts (PRWEB) September 11, 2014 -- Nearly half of businesses surveyed don’t assess their wireless assets at remote and branch locations, leaving the entire organization exposed to cyber attacks.
Pwnie Express conducted the survey last month of 367 information security professionals at enterprises across verticals.
The survey found that 40.6 percent of respondents had zero visibility into their wireless assets at remote sites. Businesses are increasingly distributed, often with hard-to-reach branch offices and remote sites. There is a proliferation of access points at these sites with wireless connections abounding, which exponentially expands the attack surface.
The survey also found that 43.9 percent of respondents were not even required to assess the wireless assets at their remote sites and with 53.6 percent of those assessing only doing it on a quarterly basis or less.
“The survey reflects what we are seeing at organizations and what their IT staff are telling us – that their headquarters are relatively fortified and that their greatest weaknesses today are their remote locations as they have very little visibility into what is connected from those sites,” said Peter Velikin, VP of Marketing at Pwnie Express, a leading provider of vulnerability assessment and penetration testing for the distributed enterprise. “With BYOD (bring your own device) commonplace and wireless devices in greater use daily it only takes one unknown connection or rogue device to breach the entire organization.”
The survey found that in addition to limited vulnerability assessment at remote locations, despite increasing compliance mandates requiring penetration testing including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), 51.8 percent of respondents said they did not conduct penetration tests at remote locations.
For more information on the survey please contact: http://www.pwnieexpress.com or write to info(at)pwnieexpress(dot)com
About Pwnie Express
Pwnie Express provides a simple and scalable asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing solutions for remote sites and all wireless spectrums. At its core are open source tools integrated on a smart platform available in a variety of form factors, which have helped thousands of enterprises worldwide get unprecedented real-time actionable insight into their distributed network infrastructure. The award-winning products are backed by the expertise of Pwnie Express Labs, the company’s security research arm. The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
Sara Kantor, Pwnie Express, http://pwnieexpress.com, +1 617-267-1777, [email protected]
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