A Swiss company working in cyberspace security claims thousands of Portuguese servers, including hundreds of manufacturers and restaurants, “have their doors open to hackers”.
BinaryEdge introduces itself in its latest blog as a company that particularly loves Portugal “as most of us grew up there”.
It then goes on to outline some of the many failings its team has detected – comparing the country to Switzerland.
As Ana Barbosa, writing the blog, explains: Portugal has six million public IP addresses, with a population of approximately 10 million, while smaller Switzerland (with only eight million inhabitants) has more than three times as many IP addresses.
The disparity is just one indication of Portugal’s ‘lack of security’.
Barbosa introduces what she calls a “fun fact”.
Portugal is famous for its “amazing food”, she says, so “it is not surprising” that most of the servers exposed to the internet stem from an application called WinREST, used in restaurants and bars.
Leaving a server ‘exposed’ and what in the industry is called ‘unpatched’ can cause “serious problems” as hackers can “compromise an entire device or even the network where the device is connected”.
Her company found “water reservoirs, intelligent house management and other critical systems” exposed to hackers, she explains – adding that hackers often selling their information to interested groups.
The report, in English, can be found at https://blog.binaryedge.io/2016/03/31/security-of-a-country-portugal/
