Old Web applications don't go away — they linger and spread security vulnerabilities around their organizations. These "ghost sites" are critical assets for criminals and weaknesses for enterprises, according to a new report by High-Tech Bridge, a Web security company.

The report, "Abandoned Web Applications: Achilles' Heel of FT 500 Companies," found that 70% of the FT 500 can find information for accessing old websites for sale on the Dark Web, and that 92% of externally facing Web applications have exploitable flaws or weaknesses.

While the report looked at the 500 largest companies in both the US and Europe, the largest 500 in the US, specifically, have 293,512 exernal systems accessible from the Internet, 42,549 of which have a live Web application with dynamic content and functionality, it states.

"This means a US company has an average of 85.1 applications that can be easily discovered externally and are not protected by 2FA, strong authentication or other security controls aimed to reduce application accessibility to untrusted parties," the report states.

High-Tech Bridge notes that its research looked only at application infrastructure, not network or control system infrastructure that might be explorable through a tool such as Shodan.

Read more here.

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