Fully patched PCs are a rare breed
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Security: We've heard of it A small minority of users - as few as one in 20 - is running fully-patched Windows PCs.â¦
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Although Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, about 80% of PCs shipped with the open source operating system this year will eventually run pirated versions of Windows
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Running 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system is a step closer to reality.
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A fast PC doesnât mean just a fast processor. Hard-drive speeds, memory and other considerations all affect a systemâs performance.
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Rare, out-of-cycle Windows patch fixes one flaw, but attacks through other known, yet-to-be-plugged holes continue.
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One in five applications installed on Windows PCs are missing security patches, a Copenhagen-based vulnerability tracker has reported.According to Secunia APS, more than 20 percent of the applications scanned by its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) utility were open to attack because available fixes for security flaws had not been applied.&quot;More than 20 percent of all applications installed on users&#39; PCs have known security flaws, but the users have yet to install the patch provided by the vendor of [the] product,&quot; said Jakob Balle, Secunia&#39;s development manager, in a post to the company&#39;s blog last week.The 20 percent figure was based on scans of more than 14.5 million applications installed on the Windows PCs operated by users who downloaded and installed Secunia&#39;s PSI. The utility scans for some 4,200 different applications and reports on their patch status.The 1-in-5 ratio, however, is an improvement over earlier PSI scans. Last May, Secunia said that 28 percent of the&#160;applications PSI scanned were missing available security updates.Secunia released the free patch-detection utility a year ago but shifted it to Release Candidate 1 (RC1) stage earlier this month. The company claimed that nearly 191,000 users have downloaded and run the program.PSI, which runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Server 2003, can be downloaded from Secunia&#39;s Web site.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Update repairs a serious security hole that cybercrooks have been using to drop malicious software onto Windows PCs.
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Over a month and a half after completing Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Microsoft has finally released the first patch that fixes a problem with that release.
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In brief Exploit circulating for unpatched vuln
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Well, if you haven&#39;t patched your PC yet, now is the time. A sample program hit the Internet on Wednesday, showing by example how malicious coders could compromise Windows computers by using a flaw in the
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Blog: Researcher finds a basic cookie-handling error that could compromise Windows PCs.
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Will a trifecta try at fixing Internet Explorer patch be the charm?
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A recently discovered hole in Google Desktop has been quietly patched after researchers discreetly brought it to the company's attention. Though exploiting the vulnerability wasn't easy, the impact on compromised systems could have been devastating.
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More PCs run the alternative OS, but many will end up with a pirated version of Windows, report says.
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(InfoWorld) - A Microsoft security executive released data Thursday showing that, six months after shipping Windows Vista, his company has left more publicly disclosed Vista bugs unpatched than it did with Windows XP. In total, Microsoft has patched 12 out of 27 disclosedÂ Vista vulnerabilitiesÂ in the six months after it first shipped last November. During XP's first six months, Microsoft's security team patched 36 out of 39 known bugs. The data was published by Jeff Jones, a Microsoft security strategy director, who said that overall, Vista was doing better than XP. "Windows Vista continues to show a trend of fewer total and fewer high-severity vulnerabilities at the six month mark compared to its predecessor product, Windows XP," he wrote. Jones didn't address the larger number of unpatched vulnerabilities, but he did note most of the unpatched Vista bugs were not critical. Microsoft had left only one high-severity Vista vulnerability unpatched during the period. At the end of XP's first six months, there were two high-severity bugs that were unpatched. Microsoft patched 23 high-severity XP bugs during its first six months, compared with only one high-severity Vista flaw. Jones argued that Vista had a lower number of vulnerabilities than competitive operating system products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Mac OS X. He published the data in an effort to show how Microsoft's software development methodology, called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is yielding dividends. But his method of comparing Windows to Linux and Mac OS X is problematic, according to some. "This is an apples-to-oranges comparison," said HD Moore, one of the hackers behind the popular Metasploit penetration testing toolkit. "If you want a more accurate view, try comparing the number of flaws between Microsoft-developed software and vendor-X-developed software. Most Linux vendors don't actually write the majority of the packages they include," he said via e-mail. "Alternatively, force Microsoft to include all vulnerabilities in common third-party software," he added. "For example, the thousands of exploitable ActiveX controls that... vendors include with a Windows system." According to Randy Abrams, director of technical education with antivirus vendor Eset, it will be more interesting to look at vulnerability statistics once Vista becomes more popular than XP, and the target of more hackers. But Microsoft has stepped up its security practices, he added. "I think their Security Development Lifecycle initiative has improved the quality of the code," he said. Â
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In sharp contrast to last month&#39;s barrage of critical patches, Microsoft has offered up just one &quot;important&quot; fix for users to implement in its scheduled round of security updates for November.
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The promise of an easy transition between 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows is easing the minds of many users, but PC vendors and the major software houses may see things differently.