Vulnerabilities found in half of top 50 PC applications

Half of the top 50 applications on private PCs had vulnerabilities discovered in 2015, most of which were rated as either highly or extremely critical, according to Flexera Software.

Flexera subsidiary Secunia Research has published its latest annual Vulnerability Review, which shows that 2048 vulnerabilities were discovered in 25 of the 50 most popular applications on private PCs.

Although non-Microsoft applications accounted for 33% of the products in the top 50, they were responsible for 79% of the vulnerabilities. This is roughly consistent with the share over a five-year period.

By contrast, only 7% of vulnerabilities were discovered in Windows 7 and 14% were found in Microsoft applications.

Among all software, Secunia recorded 16,081 vulnerabilities across 2484 products from 263 vendors last year. But only 13.3% of these were rated as highly critical and 0.5% as extremely critical.

Of these, 84% had patches available on the day of disclosure. A total of 25 zero-day vulnerabilities were discovered in 2015, the same as in 2014.

Last year, 1114 vulnerabilities were discovered in the five most popular web browsers — Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari — a 4% increase from the previous year.

Image courtesy of Christiaan Colen under CC