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Utility software ‘poor and vulnerable to attack’
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Business software used by energy and utility companies has performed badly in a study which assessed key issues like transferability and security.

Those findings are highlighted in a report compiled by Cast software, which makes software quality tools.

The majority of the applications used in the energy and utility industry scored below average in terms of transferability. This meant that many users struggled to understand the application, leading to a decrease in productivity and a rise in mistakes.

In terms of security, energy and utilities apps were ranked below other sectors such as retail, finance, telecoms and manufacturing.

This second annual CRASH (Cast Report on Application Software Health) report examined the “health” of world-wide software appliations by examining the source code of 745 applications from 160 different companies, spanning 10 industry sectors, and 8 programming languages.

The report’s assessment showed that the energy and utility industry had a very high number of structural quality violations per app, the equivalent of dropping a stitch in sewing, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

The researchers suggested that part of the problem may lie with utilities’ increased use of Java, the coding language used since the eighties primarily for internet facing apps.

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