The report stated that “Equifax lacked a comprehensive IT asset inventory, meaning it lacked a complete understanding of the assets it owned. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for Equifax to know if vulnerabilities existed on its networks. If a vulnerability cannot be found, it cannot be patched.” The Equifax case is one example of an existential and underreported cybersecurity issue: the vast majority of organizations do not have comprehensive visibility of every asset they need to secure.

In our third State of the Cybersecurity Attack Surface report, we continue to see enterprises struggle with many of the same issues they’ve been grappling with—they are blind to IT assets missing endpoint protection, patch management, and, as we now include in this report, vulnerability management. “Stale” IT assets continue to proliferate across corporate networks. Organizations are unnecessarily paying for unused licenses while facing budget cuts and economic challenges.