Security Concerns about Third Party Software on your computer (part 2)

Significant security concerns … on your computer … must not be ignored.

This is the second of a few posts about this topic. Note I will use ‘3rd Party app’, ‘apps’ and ‘Third Party Software’ interchangeably throughout these postings.

In the last post I covered what 3rd Party Apps are and which ones I’m most interested in covering for my clients.

This article shares some interesting facts about how many 3rd Party Apps can likely be found on your computer! I will also share important information about updates (the very few you know of, the many you are missing out on!), ideas about why so much of your software is out of date (and as a result likely very insecure).

  • How many 3rd party apps do you think you have on your computer???

I asked you to guess last time. If you haven’t then do so now! You may be surprised …

To get the data below you should know that I look at over 100 different 3rd applications on a daily basis and take care of updating them for subscribers of managed services plans I offer.

And the answers are …

Across our customer base:

  • The average number of apps installed per PC is 15!
    A full 20% of devices we look over have 15 third party apps installed!
  • 50% of our users (very likely you) have between 14 to 18 apps installed on their PC.
  • 50% of our users have 15 or more apps (up to 28).
  • 80% of our user base have 12 or more; 90% have 10 or more; 95% have 8 or more.

Here’s a chart that tells the story graphically:

Distribution of 3rd Party Applications across customer base

Distribution of 3rd Party Applications across customer base

No matter how you look at it the odds are that you have many more 3rd party apps installed on your computer than you ever imagined and the software developers that create these applications are releasing important updates all the time.

The next article will continue on with this topic covering:

  • How many updates are there really anyway? (A LOT!!!)
  • Am I really missing out on a lot of important updates? (YES YOU ARE!)
  • Does it really matter if I update or don’t? (YOU BET!)
  • What sort of security risks are there? (both in not updating but also in incorrectly updating)

You can click here to get to part 3 of this topic.

David Ingalls

About David Ingalls

Owner/Chief Tech DavidIngallsOnline.com & Ingalls Computer Services, ingallscomputerservices.com
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