Security News > 2021 > November > Threat actors find and compromise exposed services in 24 hours
Researchers set up 320 honeypots to see how quickly threat actors would target exposed cloud services and report that 80% of them were compromised in under 24 hours.
Malicious actors are constantly scanning the Internet for exposed services that could be exploited to access internal networks or perform other malicious activity.
To track what software and services are targeted by threat actors, researchers create publicly accessible honeypots.
In a new study conducted by Palo Altos Networks' Unit 42, researchers set up 320 honeypots and found that 80% of the honeypots were compromised within the first 24 hours.
This finding is very concerning as it could take days, if not longer, to deploy new security updates as they are released, while threat actors just need hours to exploit exposed services.
Finally, always install the latest security updates as they become available as threat actors rush to utilize exploits for new vulnerabilities as they are published.