PC users with outdated software vulnerable to new security threats, Report reveals

• A trend report by Avast showed that outdated programs still dominate in the PC world.
• 55 percent of software installed by users, were found to be running older versions.

Security software company Avast released a new report that details trends surrounding the PC world in 2018. It portrays a comprehensive picture by highlighting information pertaining to software as well as hardware present in PCs. A total of 163 million devices was analyzed for the report.

Outdated applications

In the report, it was found that 55 percent of programs had older versions running in these PCs.

Apart from this, tools and frameworks such as Visual C++ Redistributable etc., were installed more compared to actual Windows applications. Moreover, these programs were not up to date.

7-ZIP and Java, which was listed in the most installed software group, has security vulnerabilities. “In May 2018 7-ZIP fixed an issue in the RAR extraction logic that could allow a DoS attack or execute harmful code embedded in RAR files. Another popular example is Java: Versions 6, 7 and 8 are still widely installed and no longer up-to-date. Even users who are on the latest Java version 10 release should check for updates regularly to avoid any security issues," the report stated.

Additionally, internal software such as Windows 10 operating systems, and Microsoft Office were also running older versions. Around 20 percent of Windows 10 systems had outdated versions with 8 percent of these systems said to be vulnerable.

When it comes to Microsoft Office, 15 percent of users were found to have the Enterprise 2007 version installed which is no longer supported by Microsoft.

Along with outdated programs in these systems, hardware components were also found to be relatively old. According to the report, the average age of a PC was six years old. Overall, older components slow down PCs on top of being vulnerable to threats.