14 DAY TRIAL // According to the numbers seen by Secunia after releasing the 2.0 beta version of Personal Software Inspector, Adobe Flash Player, Reader and AIR accounted for nearly 45% of all installations auto-patched by the program.
The Personal Software Inspector (PSI) is a security application developed by Secunia, one of the top vulnerability research companies in the world.
The program leverages the company's comprehensive vulnerability database to detect outdated software installations on computers it runs on.
Unlike its previous versions, PSI 2.0, which has recently entered public beta stage, is not only capable of alerting users of insecure applications, but can also automatically deploy the necessary patches if available.
During the first day after the beta launch the company detected 2,024 outdated Flash Player ActiveX plug-ins (Internet Explorer) and 920 Flash Player NPAPI ones (Firefox) on a user base of 6,500.
This paints a grim picture, because the people who install beta versions of security products like PSI are usually advanced users.
And if one third of these individuals fail to keep one of the most attacked applications up to date, then what expectations can the security community have from regular users?
The 24 hours period might be too short to get an accurate feel of the whole landscape, but some general conclusions can still be drawn from the stats gathered by Secunia.
For example, four of the top five applications that required automatic patching are developed by Adobe, which explains why the company's products are common targets for hackers.
Meanwhile, the complete top ten is as follows: Adobe Flash Player (ActiveX) (20%), Adobe Reader 9.x (10%), Adobe Flash Player (NPAPI) (9%), Sun Java JRE 1.6.x / 6.x (8%), Adobe AIR 2.x (5%), Irfanview 4.x (5%), Opera 10.x (3%), Skype 4.x (3%), Wireshark 1.x (3%), Mozilla Firefox 3.6.x (2%).
One might observe that there are no Apple products in this list, which is weird given the company's track record. However, this is because they weren't counted.
"Unfortunately, Apple products does not natively support 'silent install', which is required for automatic updating. We are working to address this during the beta […]," Jakob Balle, Secunia's VP of product development, explained.
Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 2.0 Beta can be downloaded from here.