The software industry’s inability to reduce the number of security flaws in its code is fueling an age of the “everyday hacker,” criminals who can exploit vulnerabilities with a minimum of technical skills, Security testing firm Vercode’s latest State of Software Security (SoSS) report suggests.

Of the 22,430 applications submitted to the firm’s code analysis service in an 18-month period ending June 2012, only 13 percent of web applications were able to pass the generic OWASP Top 10 list of security problems.

When it came to standalone applications, only 31 percent complied with the separate CWE/SANS Top 25, a significant decrease on the compliance rate in the previous SoSS report caused, Veracode suggested, by a broader sample of companies using the service.

Nevertheless, the percentage of applications containing common but serious flaws such as SQL injection remained static at 32 percent, with cross-site scripting also stubbornly entrenched at 67 percent.

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