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35% of YOU are vulnerable to remote code execution!

Yes, I'm talking to YOU, readers of Hardware 2.0!
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Yes, I'm talking to YOU, readers of Hardware 2.0!

After reading Ryan Naraine's post on Flash adoption rates for readers of his Zero Day blog, and discovering that 35% of his readers were running outdated Flash plug-ins, I decided to check the logs for Hardware 2.0. I was hoping to find that you guys would be on the cutting-edge when it came to keeping your software updated.

I was disappointed.

Why? Because the stats for Hardware 2.0 reflect what Naraine sees for his blog.

03-11-2010-16-41-25.png

These stats are for yesterday alone, but taking the data for the month as a whole gives pretty much the same result.

And in case you are wondering, the latest Flash Player update, which is update 10.1.85.3 has been out since SEPTEMBER 20th!!!!!

FOR SHAME!!!!!

Putting the data another way, if there was a zombie outbreak, and the infection spread via vulnerable Flash players, things would look like this.

03-11-2010-16-41-25b.png

And as Naraine says, this is serious stuff:

Every version of Flash Player marked as “Outdated” is vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities that can be exploited via the Web to launch drive-by malware downloads (no extra click required).

Come on, you can do better than this! Next month I'll look at the data again, and I expect you to do better. Much better!

Don't make me come over there are update for you, or worse still, revoke your geek license!

Check to see if your Flash Player is updated NOW!

[UPDATE: Thanks to NonZealot for reminding us that you can use Secunia PSI to scan for outdated Flash plugins, Java and much more.]

[UPDATE #2: Come Thursday, there's a new update to Flash being released because ... yeah, you guessed it ... 10.1.85.3 contains a critical bug! It'll be interesting to watch adoption of this new update.]

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