How many applications exposed to the web are in danger of attack? According to Imperva’s study, most of them. The five most prevalent vulnerabilities:

Type of Attack Apps at Risk
Cross-site scripting 79%
SQL injection 62%
Parameter changing 61%
Permissions exploiting 53%
Information collecting 37%

That’s not the worst of it. Imperva discovered that, upon retesting, 60% of the apps were still wide open, due to conflicting upgrades, wrong fixes, undone fixes or failed fixes.

E-mail servers are especially troublesome since, by nature, they jabber with the outside world around-the-clock… and they’re chock-full of the secrets bad guys crave. So what’s an admin to do?

Here’s a thought: Start by mounting an email gateway on your firewall’s DMZ. Then set your firewall to allow inbound SMTP only from the gateway. Your mail server’s risk of penetration will drop dramatically… along with those pesky spam and virus problems.

How easy was that?