In an analysis carried out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on common vulnerabilities and exposures, it has been found that 2020 holds the record for the highest reports of security loopholes than any other year to date.
The report shows that, in the year 2020 alone, as much as 18,103 vulnerabilities were reported with almost 10,342 of them classified as high or critical in urgency. It is worth nothing that the number of critical bugs discovered in 2020 outnumbered the sum total of vulnerabilities disclosed in 2010.NIST added that over 68% of the CVE’s that were reported did not require any user interaction to be exploited.
The number of attack vectors that don’t require any user privileges dropped 13% in four years and stands at 58%. However, the number of vulnerabilities that require high-level privileges has been on the rise. This means that cybercriminals are resorting to age-old attacks like phishing. Alarmingly, out of all the CVE’s that were reported, around 4000 of them were deemed extremely critical as they did not require any privileges or user interaction to be exploited.