Over 78% of All PHP Installs Are Insecure

An anonymous reader writes: Anthony Ferrara, a developer advocate at Google, has published a blog post with some statistics showing the sorry state of affairs for website security involving PHP. After defining a list of secure and supported versions of PHP, he used data from W3Techs to find a rough comparison between the number of secure installs and the number of insecure or outdated installs. After doing some analysis, Ferrara sets the upper bound on secure installs at 21.71%. He adds, "These numbers are optimistic. That's because we're counting all version numbers that are maintained by a distribution as secure, even though not all installs of that version number are going to be from a distribution. Just because 5.3.3 is maintained by CentOS and Debian doesn't mean that every install of 5.3.3 is maintained. There will be a small percentage of installs that are from-source. Therefore, the real 'secure' number is going to be less than quoted." Ferrara was inspired to dig into the real world stats after another recent discussion of responsible developer practices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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