The risk hiding behind exposed MCP servers

**Executive summary:** Wiz Research found that many Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers remain internet-reachable and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data (employee PII, internal records), write/delete capabilities, and in some cases code execution or cloud credentials; the study reports broad prevalence (MCP present across ~80% of cloud environments with ~1 in 6 exposing at least one server), confirmed instances of data return and metadata/temporary credential access, and recommends auditing reachable MCP endpoints, enabling OAuth 2.1, capturing agent prompts, logging invocations, and scoping backend credentials.