One in five software apps installed on computers are insecure or out of date, according to data from an online security inspection service.

The data is based on scans of more than 14.5 million applications on end-user computers whose users installed Secunia's freely available software inspection tool.

The Danish security firm said stats from its Secunia (Personal Software Inspector) PSI service show that users are continuing to struggle with the task of keeping their software applications up to date.

"More than 20 per cent of all applications installed on users PCs have known security flaws but the user have yet to install the patch provided by the vendor of product," Thomas Kristensen, Secunia's CTO told El Reg.

Secunia released a revised version of its free Secunia PSI tool earlier this week. ®

Related stories

Fully patched PCs are a rare breed (9 January 2008)
Hackers target unpatched Office flaw (5 February 2007)
IE 'unsafe' for 284 days last year (5 January 2007)
eEye launches 0-day tracker site (7 December 2006)
Web viruses drop off despite IE exploit flap (18 October 2006)
Targeted Trojan attacks on the rise (15 October 2006)
Another day, another zero-day MS exploit (28 September 2006)
Unpatched enterprise security bugs proliferate (24 August 2006)