Keep Your Applications Current With Secunia PSI
By Jin Nan Goto
Making sure Windows is fully patched is the most important way to improve your security against malware and viruses. Within hours of patching a security hole, Malware creators will have reverse engineered the patch and will actively start exploiting the problem. This creates a short timeframe where the computers that did not receive the update are vulnerable. Antivirus software can help protect you but it is not guaranteed to prevent malware from installing on your computer, especially if the exploit is new. Ensuring that you install updates (eliminating the problem) as soon as they are released provides the best protection.
However it’s not just Microsoft products that suffer critical security flaws and patches. While Microsoft provides its updates automatically through Windows updates, many third party applications such as Adobe Reader and Java Runtime may go a long time before they the patch is installed. During that time your computer will be vulnerable. Also, Microsoft to its credit has greatly improved the security on Windows (especially Windows Vista). In fact Microsoft reported that in the first half of 2008 none of the top 10 browser exploits affecting Windows Vista were Microsoft Vulnerabilities. All were from third party software vendors (Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 5).
This illustrates that just patching Windows is quickly becoming insufficient as malware is now frequently targeting popular non-Microsoft products. Secunia PSI is a free program that will scan your computer and will check all of your installed programs (both Microsoft programs and programs from other vendors). It will check and see if there are vulnerabilities with those programs that have been patched. It will then provide a link to the update.
Secunia PSI is very easy to run and I found it very useful for alerting me to out of date software that I wouldn’t normally think of. I recently reinstalled windows on this machine, and when I ran it I knew that Adobe Reader and Adobe flash player was out of date (just because my restore disks were old). Sure enough Flash player and Adobe reader were flagged by Secunia. However, it also alerted me that my version of Java Runtime environment was also out of data and had an update available. For convenience, links to the patches were provided and that made fixing all the issues found by Secunia very easy. Secuina PSI is an incredibly valuable tool for securing your PC and I highly recommend it to everyone.
You can download Secunia PSI from this address
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
