An investigation conducted by F-Secure early this year revealed thousands of instances of companies using misconfigured systems and outdated software in corporate networks. The security firm reviewed 85,000 security events of the 100 most common vulnerabilities using its vulnerability scanner/management solution.

Some 7% of the reviewed security events contained high severity ratings and nearly half of them were found easily exploitable via remote code execution. F-Secure's findings revealed that the 10 most common security weaknesses were actually low severity vulnerabilities, and accounted for more than 61% of all vulnerabilities discovered. 

"It's bad news for a company if an attacker finds one of these highly severe vulnerabilities. The fact that we found thousands of issues this severe suggests some serious security shortfalls amongst companies. Either they're not implementing patch management programs, or they're forgetting to include parts of their network in their maintenance practices," said Jarno Niemelä, lead researcher, F-Secure Labs.

Read the F-Secure press release for more on the investigation findings.