One in four users at risk due to outdated browsers

Nearly a quarter of users don’t use the latest browser versions, and those using Mozilla Firefox are the slowest when it comes to updating, which leaves them open to all kinds of web-based attacks, Kaspersky Lab warns.

Basing their results on the information collected from their 10 million randomly selected customers from different regions across the world, the company has discovered that Chrome users are nearly as numerous as Internet Explorer ones (36.5 and 37.8 percent, respectively), while the numbers for Firefox (19.5 percent) keep falling.

While the news isn’t good for Mozilla, it is for security, as only 69.5 percent of Firefox users use the latest two versions, but 94.7 percent of Chrome users and 96.5 percent of IE users do the same.

Also, compared to Chrome users, Firefox users update to the newer version at a slower speed and more users tend to stay on the older version for a longer period of time.

The research differentiates between older (but still supported) versions of the browsers and the outdated ones, but still point out that, all in all, 23 percent of the users haven’t opted for the latest versions and the security improvement they bring.

This could be due to the fact that some users simply don’t care about improvements to use and security, and others don’t want the new features. Others still have disabled automatic updating because they discovered on more than one occasion that new browser versions can be incompatible with the plugins they use.

Whatever the reason, they make themselves easy targets for web-based attacks – some of which still use older exploits since they are still efficient.

The data for the report was collected in August through the cloud-based Kaspersky Security Network, and the numbers for beta versions of Chrome and Firefox, as well as those for the recently released IE 10, were too small to include in the statistics.

The report also includes recommendations for individual and enterprise users, so you might want to check it out.