98 percent of PCs vulnerable, says Secunia

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 04 December 2008 10:43

Your IT - Home IT

A new study suggests that at least 98 percent of PCs are running at least one piece of software with a known security vulnerability.

Statistics collected from exactly 20,000 users over a seven day period show that only 1.91 percent of PCs have exactly zero insecure programs.

OK, so the 98 percent headline number is an overstatement in that the study only looks at Windows PCs, not those running Mac OS X or Linux. We'll overlook that for now. 98 percent of 90 percent (or whatever percentage of the installed base is running Windows) is still a shipload of computers.

Denmark-based vulnerability intelligence provider Secunia offers a free tool called Personal Software Inspector (PSI) that's used to check PCs for software that hasn't had the latest security patches applied.

We're quite prepared to believe Secunia's IT development manager Jakob Balle when he says the figures collected by the company are likely to be "best case" because "The users of the Secunia PSI are likely to be more vigilant and security minded than all other Internet users."

If you weren't worried about keeping your software up to date, you probably wouldn't use PSI. On the other hand, if you were extremely confident your installation was up to date, you probably wouldn't bother with Secunia's utility.

On the other hand, PSI is only free to home/private users, so the results are presumably skewed away from professionally-managed systems that you might expect to be kept more up to date.

But is that necessarily the case? Please read on.