SANS Top 20 Vulnerabilities v4.0

One of the few useful things the FBI's (now the DHS's) NIPC has ever done is work with SANS to produce the SANS Top Twenty. A new version was released this week. It's a great resource for those that don't sit around thinking about risk mitigation all day long.

Three years ago, the SANS Institute and the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) at the FBI released a document summarizing the Ten Most Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities. Thousands of organizations used that list, and the expanded Top Twenty lists that followed one and two years later, to prioritize their efforts so they could close the most dangerous holes first. The vulnerable services that led to the examples above Blaster, Slammer, and Code Red, as well as NIMDA worms - are on that list.

This updated SANS Top Twenty is actually two Top Ten lists: the ten most commonly exploited vulnerable services in Windows and the ten most commonly exploited vulnerable services in UNIX and Linux. Although there are thousands of security incidents each year affecting these operating systems, the overwhelming majority of successful attacks target one or more of these twenty vulnerable services.