Top 10 Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities of 2020

Top 10 Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities of 2020

What cybersecurity vulnerabilities new and old should organizations look out for this year? Let IBM X-Force be your guide to today’s top cybersecurity threats with this detailed report.


First, scanning for and exploiting vulnerabilities emerged as the top infection vector of 2020, according to the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index. In other words, attackers are finding that searching networks for unpatched issues or common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and exploiting those vulnerabilities has become the most common — and successful — method for gaining initial access to a network. In fact, this infection method has surpassed even phishing emails and appears to have largely displaced credential theft as the most reliable method for attackers to infiltrate a network.


The State of Today’s Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities


One CVE, CVE-2019-19871 (a Citrix server path traversal flaw), was far and away the most exploited vulnerability in 2020, according to X-Force data. Despite the dominance of this relatively new vulnerability, the list of the 10 most exploited vulnerabilities of 2020 was dominated by older security issues, with just two out of the top 10 being discovered in 2020.


The number of new vulnerabilities identified each year has followed a general upward trend since 1988, with 17,992 new vulnerabilities identified in 2020, and culminating in a grand total of 180,171 vulnerabilities identified by the end of 2020.


As cybersecurity vulnerabilities from prior years continue to pose a threat for organizations that have not yet patched them, this cumulative effect of vulnerabilities is increasing attack opportunities for threat actors on a yearly basis.


Figure 1: Newly Identified and Cumulative Vulnerabilities Per Year, ..

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