Aging PCs Running Out-of-Date Software Bring Security Worries

More than half of the software running on PCs around the world is outdated, with millions of users still logging into computers running Windows Vista and XP. That's just some of the information to come from a new report on PC software and the risks posed to security.

The "Avast 2019 PC Trends Report" is based on anonymized data from 163 million computers running Avast and AVG security software. It presents information on both the hardware and software running the world's business and personal applications — and the picture it paints is of an infrastructure growing older with each passing year.

In fact, the average age of a desktop PC is 6 years old, up from 5.5 years old in 2017. That's compared with less than a three-year average life span for a smartphone. Age continues to be an issue with application languages and frameworks, too. According to the report's authors, "Our report shows that the number of installed tools and frameworks is higher than 'real' apps, such as Office or Skype. In some cases, these aren't being kept up-to-date by the user or the vendor."

Read more here.