OPSWAT Report Finds 70% Windows Devices Out of Date

OPSWAT today announced the release of their latest market share report, which includes detailed analysis of the antivirus market share worldwide. In addition to antivirus coverage, the report also introduces new comparison sections showing antivirus product usage by operating system and the percentage of devices with up-to-date operating systems.

The quarterly report includes a significant focus on the ever-competitive antivirus vendor and product market worldwide. Similar to previous OPSWAT market share reports, among users with real-time protection enabled, Microsoft maintains a small lead in the worldwide antivirus vendor market, with more than a quarter of the market, and Avast follows closely behind. AVG, Symantec, and Avira rounded out the top five vendors. In the antivirus product section, avast! Free Antivirus finished first (based on users with real-time protection enabled), and Microsoft Security Essentials and Avira Free Antivirus finished second and third in the antivirus product market worldwide. The top three most detected antivirus products accounted for almost half of the antivirus product market share worldwide. To see more details and market share percentages, view the full report.

For the first time OPSWAT’s market share report also provides a comprehensive breakdown of antivirus product usage by operating system. A comparison is provided for three Windows operating systems, Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. The report shows a wide array of antivirus products utilized on the Windows 7 platform, which could be associated with users looking for more ways to secure their machine before Microsoft ends product support in early 2015. Microsoft’s Windows Defender, which comes pre-packaged with the operating system, finished first in antivirus product market for both Windows 8 and 8.1.

Also new to the report is data on system health, specifically the percentage of Windows devices with up-to-date operating systems. The report shows a high percentage of devices with automatic updating of their operating system enabled, but over seventy percent of devices were not actually running the latest version of the operating system. Looking at whether the operating system is up-to-date can provide insight to the potentially vulnerabilities left unpatched.

“The new operating system categories within the report give us a better representation of the protective steps users are taking to secure their device,” said Derek Bass, who manages this data collection effort for OPSWAT. “We were interested to see the percentage of devices running the latest operating system software, considering unpatched versions can be another vulnerability for cyber-attackers to exploit.”

The report also highlights the percentage of devices with password protection enabled. As seen in the report, a higher percentage of laptop devices had password protection enabled at the time of detection compared to desktop machines. Portable devices such as laptops are more likely to have password protection enabled, due to the higher risk of these device types being stolen.

All of the extensive information shown in the report was collected by OPSWAT Gears. The free Gears tool provides home users and security professionals with greater visibility into the security and compliance of devices by looking at the status of installed security applications such as antivirus, antiphishing, firewall, hard disk encryption and much more. In addition, Gears provides insight into whether devices are infected by threats that their installed antivirus software can’t detect or can’t remediate. To try the Gears tool, please visit www.opswatgears.com/download.

For more information regarding this report please contact marketing(at)opswat(dot)com. Previous OPSWAT quarterly market share reports are available to view on OPSWAT’s website.