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98 Out of Every 100 Computers Have Insecure Programs Install

Security experts at Secunia have revealed that 98.09% of PCs have one or more insecure programs installed, which is an increase from 95.46% at the start of 2008. The data was collected from the first run of Secunia's PSI security software on 20,000 PCs:

"Close to all PCs continues to run with several insecure programs installed. If anything, these numbers are worse now than previously (11 months ago) when we generated these numbers initially."

Number of insecure programs per PC/user (Dec 2008):

0 Insecure Programs: 1.91% of PCs

1-5 Insecure Programs: 30.27% of PCs

6-10 Insecure Programs: 25.07% of PCs

11+ Insecure Programs: 45.76% of PCs

Number of insecure programs per PC/user (Jan 2008):

0 Insecure Applications: 4.54% of computers

0-5 Insecure Applications: 27.83% of computers

6-10 Insecure Applications: 25.69% of computers

11+ Insecure Applications: 41.94% of computers

It's worth noting that "insecure programs" refers to software that is known to have vulnerabilities. A vulnerability in a program can be exploited by hackers to do anything from compromising a PC, to automatically install Trojans/Viruses, to sniff out private information. We suspect that the test didn't include computer operating systems *cough*.

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