Only eight percent of virtual appliances are free of vulnerabilities

Virtual appliances are an inexpensive and relatively easy way for software vendors to distribute their wares for customers to deploy in public and private cloud environments, but new research shows appliances often have exploitable and fixable vulnerabilities, or are running on outdated or unsupported operating systems. The Orca Security research study found 401,571 total vulnerabilities in scanning 2,218 virtual appliance images from 540 software vendors. This means less than eight percent of virtual appliances were free of known vulnerabilities. "Customers assume virtual appliances are free from security risks, but we found a troubling combination of rampant vulnerabilities and unmaintained operating… [Continue Reading]