1 in 5 ratio of applications pose security risk?

By Janine de Blois

Internet security firm Securnia has announced on its “Security Watchdog” blog that “More than 20% of all applications installed on users PC’s have known security flaws but the user have yet to install the patch provided by the vendor of product.”

They base this information on scans done of 14,500,000 end-user applications with Securia PSI.

With the free application I downloaded nine applications were tagged as insecure in the “Easy to Patch” mode. Of those three were versions of Macromedia Flashplayer and two were versions of Javascript.

These had all been updated to the most recent, but old updates in the system generated an insecure warning. After removing the programs and reinstalling from the vendors site the results of the scan remained the same. Using the “ignore program” option this was remedied.

The others which were flagged as insecure “End-of-Life” applications were from Netscape and AOL files that had been installed on the computer at time of purchase and never used.

In the advanced user mode one of the suggested vendor update pages it linked to was for Vista; since the computer it was being run on is XP, that particular update was not correct. However, several other updates were necessary.