Author(s): Vinamra Yadav

Originally published on Towards AI.

In January 2026, security researchers at Knostic scanned the internet for MCP servers. They found 1,862 running publicly — and when they manually tested 119 at random, every single one allowed access without credentials.

Not some of them. All of them.

The servers weren’t broken. They were built exactly as the tutorials described — tutorials written before authentication existed in the MCP spec.