Security News > 2024 > March > Germany warns of 17K vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers exposed online

The German national cybersecurity authority warned on Tuesday that it found at least 17,000 Microsoft Exchange servers in Germany exposed online and vulnerable to one or more critical security vulnerabilities.

According to the German Federal Office for Information Security, around 45,000 Microsoft Exchange servers in Germany have Outlook Web Access enabled and are accessible from the Internet.

For the Exchange 2016 or 2019 servers exposed online, roughly 28% have not been patched for at least four months and are vulnerable to at least one critical security flaw exploitable in remote code execution attacks.

"As early as 2021, the BSI warned several times against the active exploitation of critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange and temporarily called the IT threat situation 'red.' Nevertheless, the situation has not improved since then, as many Exchange server operators continue to act very carelessly and do not release available security updates in a timely manner."

The BSI urged the admins of these unpatched servers to always use current Exchange versions, install all available security updates, and configure instances exposed online securely.

In February, threat monitoring service Shadowserver warned that 28,500 Microsoft Exchange servers were vulnerable to ongoing CVE-2024-21410 attacks.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/germany-warns-of-17k-vulnerable-microsoft-exchange-servers-exposed-online/