Over half of all software 'open to attack'

Veracode's State of Software Security report paints a worrying picture

Application security vendor Veracode has claimed that 58 per cent of software is vulnerable to the same sort of attacks that affected Google earlier this year.

The company used the RSA Conference in San Francisco to reveal its State of Software Security report, which warned that 58 per cent of the 1,600 applications analysed at the request of clients had vulnerabilities "similar to those exploited in the recent cyber attacks on Google, the US Department of Defense and others".

Veracode analyses a range of application types, and assesses "billions of lines of code" to build a comprehensive security overview. The firm said that a wide range of enterprise applications are susceptible to "large scale attacks".

"Because of the depth and breadth of the data in our platform, we have expansive knowledge about risk from all types of applications and across the software supply chain," said Matt Moynahan, chief executive at Veracode.

"The report analyses the state of security more comprehensively than any others in this market, and offers specific recommendations for each type of potential threat."

The security of open-source systems is comparable to commercial and outsourced software, according to Veracode.