Java is out of date on more than 40 percent of machines

Wolfgang Kandeck, CEO of Qualys, said during a presentation at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco that 80 percent of browsers his company’s BrowserCheck service checked were missing one or more patches, ComputerWorld has reported.

BrowserCheck checks for vulnerabilities in browsers (on Windows, Linux and Mac) and 18 browser plug-ins. Plugins include Flash and Reader (Adobe), Java (Oracle) and Silverlight (Microsoft) and Windows Media Player (Microsoft).

Excluding plug-ins from the figures showed that 25 percent of the machines scanned by BrowserCheck last month had an unpatched browser.

The fact that there are a lot of unpatched machines out there isn’t a surprise, but the fact that there are so many is shocking. Apparently Kandeck said as much in his presentation.

The average home user needs to be made aware of the importance of updates and it would probably help if it were a bit easier.

Tom Kelchner

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