This research demonstrates the continual progression of a cybersecurity conundrum that has become an unfortunate but permanent part of the digital environment. Progress is being made, but new fronts open up and new challenges emerge in a seemingly endless cycle. As the need for security rises to a board level concern, cyber leaders are facing more strategic issues to defend against, even while ongoing threats persist. As those security leaders stand to meet the threats, it behooves organizational leaders to provide the support and resources necessary to help enable those they must count on to keep their enterprises safe.

The report raises a number of interesting findings, which you’ll read about in the pages to come. However, one through line that emerges is the need for reliable threat intelligence and its impact on threat hunters’ ability to do their jobs well. Threat intelligence, or lack thereof, is a commonality across the top challenges respondents identified. Access to threat intelligence also affects nearly every aspect of how respondents say they do their jobs.

This year, we delve deeper into web entities, or content served over HTTP – think websites, web-based control panels, load balancers, and even APIs. Web entities have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, enabling us to shop, read the news, and stay in touch with loved ones. Our goal is to share our findings and analysis with the community to provide a deeper understanding of the complexities of the internet. We hope that readers can use these findings to enhance their understanding of the services that comprise the web and make more informed decisions about how to safeguard their digital assets.

Censys maintains the most comprehensive view of assets on the Internet by continuously scanning the public IPv4 address space across the 3,500 most popular ports. This Internet-wide scan data also powers our Attack Surface Management (ASM) product, which comprehensively maps organizations’ Internet exposure. This data allows us to understand broader trends in Internet security and how organizations are exposed across the Internet.