More than half of the applications installed on Windows PCs are obsolete, which can endanger the security of users due to vulnerabilities in software already corrected by suppliers.
About 55% of the software installed on PCs around the world is in the form of an older version of the application, according to a study by the security company Avast - and this figure is up (48%) compared to the previous edition.
15% of Windows 7 users do not have patches
Based on anonymized and aggregated data from 163 million devices worldwide, Avast's PC Trends Report also suggests that nearly one in six Windows 7 users and one in ten Windows 10 users use not up to date with their operating system, which also exposes them to exploiting security vulnerabilities at the system level.Some of the most often outdated programs are Adobe Shockwave, VLC Media Player, Skype, Java Runtime Environment, and 7-Zip Filemanager.
Pushing down the installation of updates and running out-of-date applications can cause bugs and incompatibility issues for users, but more importantly, running out-of-date software can be an open door for hackers to pull from holes left in programs for which critical security updates have not been deployed.
For example, 7-Zip has already been found to have security vulnerabilities that allow remote attackers to launch denial of service attacks, execute arbitrary code, and exploit vulnerabilities such as heap overflow. 7-Zip has fixed the vulnerabilities after their discovery, but users who have not updated their software since the patch was released may have remained vulnerable to attack.
Updates: a classic still too neglected
But the obsolescence of vulnerable applications is not t
he only source of risk. A significant number of users are operating Windows operating systems that have not received the appropriate security updates.
Windows 7 is still used on hundreds of millions of PCs, but 15% of users do not receive any security updates because they always use a preview of the OS, says Avast.
In addition, millions of users are exploiting outdated versions of Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 10. They expose themselves to attacks through vulnerabilities that have been corrected by the publisher since then.
"We need to do more to make sure our terminals do not expose us to unnecessary risks," said Ondrej Vlcek, president of Avast.
Ensuring software and systems are patched and updated can go a long way toward protecting users from cyber attacks - and at the same time providing them with a better and more user-friendly PC.