Virtual appliances are a popular way for software vendors to distribute their products to enterprise customers as they contain all the necessary pre-configured software stacks their applications need to function and can be deployed in public clouds or private data centers with ease. Unfortunately, enterprises are at risk of deploying images that are vulnerable out-of-the-box according to a new study. It found that many vendors, including well-established ones, do a poor job of patching flaws and updating the software components in their virtual appliances.
