Do you sometimes get annoyed with updates popping up on your monitor? It’s so easy to click “remind me later” or just ignore it, but that is a bad idea!

According to Danish Security Company CSIS, almost all kit-created virus and malware infections (exploit kit) are caused by the failure to update software packages. These updates from software companies are very important; the company accumulates security patches over a period and the updates will fix all those bugs and vulnerabilities that have been found.

CSIS concludes that "99.8 per cent of all virus/malware infections caused by commercial exploit kits are a direct result of the lack of updating five specific software packages".

1.  Java JRE
2. Adobe Reader/Acrobat
3. Adobe Flash
4. Microsoft Internet Explorer
5. Windows HCP

Exploit kits are packs containing malicious programs that are mainly used to carry out automated “drive-by” attacks in order to spread malware.  Internet explorer, PDF and Java together represent over 60% of the attack vector used by most popular exploit kits.

So the bottom line is that when a Microsoft Windows machine gets infected by viruses/malware it does so mainly because users forget to or don’t run updates on the software.