Riskiest Connected
Devices in 2024

This year marks Forescout Research – Vedere Labs’ fourth annual report on risky devices. We analyzed device data in Forescout’s Device Cloud between January 1 and April 30. Device Cloud is one of the world’s largest repositories of connected enterprise devices and includes IT, OT, IoT and IoMT data. The anonymized data is collected from our customer deployments and contains information from nearly 19 million devices in every industry across the globe – and grows monthly.

 

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19M

devices

2500

special-purpose operating systems

136%

YoY increase in IoT vulnerabilities

Explore Today’s Most Vulnerable Devices

Join this webinar led by Daniel dos Santos, Head of Security Research, as we reveal our latest research findings on the most critical IT, IoT, OT and IoMT devices discovered within enterprise networks in 2024. Gain exclusive insights into the inherent risks and unlock actionable strategies to effectively mitigate these risks within your organization.

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Riskiest Device Categories

Most Vulnerable Device Types

Network devices overtake endpoints as the riskiest in 2024 led by wireless access points and routers.

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Most Vulnerable Device Categories

IT dominates riskiest device categories followed by IoT.
In 2024, the Internet of Medical Things takes over Operational Technology devices.

Open Ports by Industry

  • Telnet: Healthcare (4%), technology (3%) and manufacturing (3%)
  • SSH: Entertainment (52%), technology (39%) and oil and gas (33%)
  • RDP: Services (14%), oil and gas (12%) and manufacturing (12%)
  • SMB: Technology (37%), financial (32%) and services (30%)
Access Report

Risk Scoring Methodology

To measure risk, we use Forescout’s multifactor risk scoring methodology which is calculated based on three factors: Configuration, behavior and function.

  • Configuration is the number and severity of vulnerabilities on a device, plus the quantity and criticality of open ports.
  • Behavior tracks inbound and outbound malicious traffic to devices and inbound internet traffic towards the devices
  • Function is the potential impact to the organization if a device is compromised.

Each device is assigned a risk score between one and 10. After measuring the risk of each individual device, we calculate averages per type of device to understand which types are the riskiest.

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Riskiest Devices Global Heat Map

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Countries With the Highest
Average Device Risk

Legacy Windows
by Industry

Riskiest Device Categories 2023 to 2024

  • IoT increases by 136% year over year
  • IT drops from 78% to 58%
  • Vulnerabilities in network devices expand beyond endpoints
  • Wireless access points and routers total 54% of device-type vulnerabilities

2023

2024

Dive Into the Research

Our research takes a fresh look at this year’s riskiest devices. Read the full report to see other findings, such as:
 
  • Nine brand new device types that make our list including five in the Internet of Medical Things category.
  • A highly detailed breakdown of the riskiest devices across all categories in: IT, IoT, OT and IoMT.
  • Why specific device solutions cannot effectively reduce risk because they are blind to other parts of the network being used in attacks.
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Strategic Recommendations:
How Forescout Can Help

  • Risk and exposure management: Identify, quantify and prioritize cybersecurity risk. Start by discovering and assessing every connected asset to gain real-time awareness of your attack surface.
  • Network security: Continuously monitor all connected assets to govern network access, using real-time traffic visibility to manage segmentation and dynamic control policies to mitigate and remediate risk.
  • Threat detection and response: Detect, investigate and respond to true threats and incidents using threat detection and response capabilities to collect telemetry and logs, correlate attack signals, generate high-fidelity detections and enable automated responses.
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