The IT security organization known as WhiteHat Security has recently published a report that was compiled using real-word website security data. Therefore, the paper provides a premium-grade view on significant online hazards that continue to trouble and compromise company homepages nowadays—particularly attacks that targeted corporate data across all industries that utilize digital databases to house their important information.

The report holds data gathered from January 1, 2006 to October 1, 2009, and it was able to uncover that the percentage of urgent, critical, or high-level security issues have continued to increase slowly but surely. About sixty-four percent of websites presently sport an urgent, critical, or high-level issue, while eighty-three percent of websites have an urgent, critical, or high-level issue throughout their lifecycle. Furthermore, of the twenty-two thousand security holes identified in the paper, almost nine thousand are still open, which means that the majority of issues—about thirteen thousand, in fact—have thankfully been closed.

Naturally, the WhiteHat Security's "Website Security Statistics Report" mentions only thirty-six percent of the websites to not have any critical susceptibilities to hacker exploits and the like. In a historical point of view, this percentage drops to about seventeen percent. WhiteHat was able to discover through its tireless research that the attributes of sites that don't have any security problems are nearly identical to those that do have issues, save for the fact that the former had about half as many critical vulnerabilities from the very start.

Jeremiah Grossman, the WhiteHat Security's Chief Technology Officer and Founder, related that it was "extremely interesting" to know that all websites are nigh-exactly alike when it comes to vulnerabilities; their characteristics and site format are all the same regardless if they are easier or harder to hack through.

That slight difference between affected and unaffected websites will prove significant because it demonstrates that no site can be deemed completely protected or immune from the malware epidemic and the manmade problems created by the online outlaws of the worldwide web. When it comes to being compromised by hackers, all websites "enjoy" an equal opportunity for digital destruction. Then again, the odds of being infected are significantly reduced when a business resolves to preemptively remediate and identify their security flaws and programming glitches.