Belgian firm Awingu has discovered that more than 76,000 companies in the UK – and more than 360,000 across six other countries – face a major risk of being hacked.

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is an application that, once installed on a device such as a laptop, allows a user to access a full desktop or application remotely, enabling employees to work from outside of their workplace.

However, without the addition of work firewall rules or access control lists, the RDP’s are easy to hack once you have access to the ‘gate’ of the environment – which is ordinarily not publicly available and requires a VPN connection to access.

Research into the endpoint security of Western European companies showed that the 76,626 British companies studied have access to their network set to open, allowing hackers with only a relatively low-skill level and basic hacking tools to freely break in.

Access to the system allows hackers to steal data, execute commands, install ransomware and infect other devices in the same network.

In the study, Awingu says: “Any company allowing unprotected access to their RDP endpoint is easy prey and faces the very real security threat that malicious parties can exploit this without much effort.

“We urge these companies to add an extra layer of security to their environment as soon as possible.”

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The study is a follow-up of similar research conducted in 2018 and 2019 which revealed more than 50,000 open RDP endpoints in Belgium, Sweden and Italy.

It was hoped that the results of that study would cause companies to be more cautious and limit vulnerabilities by lowering the amount of open RDP endpoints. However, the results of the latest study reveal this not to be the case.