Research: online stores in particular contain many security holes

An average website contains 79 potential security holes, while online stores would contain the most vulnerabilities. Despite this, the number of leaks has declined in recent years, according to research firm WhiteHat Security.

According to WhiteHat’s annual Website Security Statistics Report, which screened more than 7,000 sites, online stores with an average of 121 potential security holes appear to be the most vulnerable. Sites of financial institutions would have the least vulnerabilities with 17 vulnerabilities, while the average website would have 79 vulnerabilities.

Despite the fact that an average site still contains dozens of vulnerabilities, WhiteHat states that in 2010 this number was still 230. In 2007, a typical website would contain 1111 potential leaks. In addition, the time it takes to fix a vulnerability would have been reduced from 116 days to an average of 38 days.

According to WhiteHat, the most common vulnerability is cross-site scripting: about 55 percent of the sites surveyed are sensitive to this, while information leakage and spoofing account for 53 and 36 percent, respectively. Attacks through sql injections dropped to 11 percent.