Only 40% of companies deploy up-to-date Flash versions

May 11, 2016 09:30 GMT  ·  By

One in four devices employed at real-world businesses is running an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer, exposing corporate networks to a large number of security vulnerabilities fixed in the browser's recent versions.

This interesting number comes from a report that took into account telemetry data from over 2 million devices that perform over 2 million 2FA operations per day using Duo Security's two-factor authentication solution.

In the same report, the company also pointed out that almost half of the devices deployed across business networks are still running Microsoft's XP operating system and also use outdated Internet Explorer versions, exposing themselves to even greater risk than they should.

Chrome users keep their browser updated

As for the positive side of the research, Duo Security points out that most users are using up-to-date browsers. Duo says that four out of five Chrome users deploy the latest Chrome version.

The same percentages are a little bit smaller for users of other browsers. Duo says that 66 percent of all the Firefox browsers they found used up-to-date versions, while for IE/Edge users the overall number was of 58 percent, and for Safari it was 49 percent.

Only one in five enterprise workstations run Java in their browser

As for browser plugins, the company discovered Flash running on 80 percent of all devices it scanned, and Java only on 22 percent. Out of all these installations, Duo said that only 40 percent of all Flash installs were up-to-date while the number of Java was 28 percent.

Duo also analyzed the situation at an OS level. The company says that 53 percent of all Mac users are running the two most recent OS X versions while only 35 percent of Windows users run the last two versions, Windows 10 and 8.1.

Surprising is the fact that there is a larger percentage (8 percent) of Mac users running non-supported OS X versions (10.8 and before). For Windows, only 2 percent of all the detected devices were running unsupported Windows versions such as 8 and XP.

Softpedia advises companies to turn on automatic OS updates, use browsers that can auto-update automatically, and also uninstall Java and Flash if not critical for company applications.

Current Windows and OS X versions
Current Windows and OS X versions

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IE usage across devices
Current Windows and OS X versions
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