Study Finds Most Software Vulnerabilities Have Patches Within One Day

Although the total number of vulnerabilities continues to rise, new research finds that most are not zero-day risks.

Across the 1,484 products from 263 vendors that Secunia Research examined in 2015, there were 16,801 vulnerabilities.

According to the Vulnerability Review 2016, 84 percent of issues were patched the day the vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

Across the top five Web browsers—Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari–1,114 vulnerabilities were discovered in 2015.

There were 25 zero-day flaws reported across the products that the Flexera report covers, the same number as last year.

The Adobe Reader PDF application is the most popular PDF reader on the market and also had the most vulnerabilities in 2015: 133.

In its first year of release, Windows 10 had 256 reported vulnerabilities. In contrast, Windows 8 had 466 vulnerabilities reported in 2015.

Across all the vulnerabilities analyzed in the Flexera report, 57 percent were remotely exploitable by attackers.