Danish computer security firm Secunia offers a free utility called Secunia Personal Software Inspector, which can run through a user’s PC and scan for secure and dead applications and provide access to security patches. To get an idea of whether Secunia PS was useful to folks, the firm collected data from new users of its free Secunia Personal Software Inspector for a period of seven days. What did it find? Of the roughly 20,000 users surveyed, some 95.46 percent had at least one insecure application installed.
For Secunia’s purposes, an "insecure" application is one where a newer version is available which corrects one or more vulnerabilities.
What’s worse is that many users had heaps of insecure applications on their machines, and over half (58.06 percent) had over 11 insecure applications installed, making the job of patching and updating that much more daunting to computer users. As Secunia has been tracking the information over time, first-time users of Secunia PSI are even more likely to have insecure applications on their systems. However, when Secunia first polled these numbers in May 2007, it found 28 percent of all apps it scanned weren’t secure; by December that had dropped to 20 percent.
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