An alarming 93 percent of users remain unpatched to the most recent version of the Java programming language, according to a new study.

“This leaves the majority of users still vulnerable to the dangers of exploit code already in use in the wild,” Websense (News - Alert) Security Labs said in a recent blog post.

In addition, on April 16, 2013, a Java critical patch update – with 42 new security fixes – was released by Oracle (News - Alert), TMCnet reported. But Websense has found that businesses are “slow to apply the Version 7 Update 21 patch into their environment.”

In fact, two days after the release of the patch, less than 2 percent of the users had adopted Java SE Version 7 Update 21, the report said. A full week after the patch was released, less than 3 percent of users had the latest version of Java in place. And two weeks after the patch was released, just over 4 percent of users had in place the latest version of Java.

Things were not much better a month after its release, when “the number of live web requests using the most recent version of Java was only around 7 percent,” Websense said.

That means 92.8 percent of users are still vulnerable to at least one exploit in the wild.

Java patch management in the enterprise is “woefully slow,” Websense concluded in its report.

“The results of our research were frightening to say the least,” Bob Hansmann, Websense senior product manager, said in an additional blog post. “If we can't manage to curtail risk even by patching in a timely manner, we absolutely must put appropriate real-time security analysis in place to inspect every stage of an attack life cycle.”

Other updates are expected on July 16 and Oct. 15, according to Redmond Magazine.

It was also recently reported that Oracle will release a critical patch update for Java SE on June 18.