Secunia PSI - Personal Security Inspector

Secunia is a respected Danish computer security service provider, one of their primary missions is to track vulnerabilities in software and provide security tools primarily for the corporate IT market.

In addition they also provide a free tool (for personal non-corporate use) called PSI - Personal Security Inspector.

PSI acts on a dangerous problem of vulnerabilities on auxiliary and add-on software. The problem of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Office are tackled by the much improved Microsoft Update system. However what about all the other installed software which are prone to vulnerabilities? Software like Adobe Acrobat Reader, Flash, Java VM, Media players, compression utilities, third party browsers to name but a few.

Most vulnerabilities are triggered by malformed data files distributed across the internet and unless addressed can prove a real danger to the regular user. The problem is despite a lot of these programs having update systems built in it is easy to miss important updates and critical patches can be forgotten, leaving your system exposed.

PSI using a huge database from Secunia to verify your installed software and will indicate if they are insecure and have updates available.

I liked to think I kept my software updated, but after running the tool for the first time I was told I was only 92% secure there were around 15 programs that were running old insecure versions. I few updates later and I am up to 96%, there are still some programs that updates are not available for with know vulnerabilities, and some whose update process is so confusing and convoluted that updating is next to impossible (not helped by hideously unnavigable support websites, Yes Adobe/Macromedia I am looking at you!)

In my scan there were some expected culprits for being out of date, Adobe Flash, Acrobat Reader, Quicktime and Realplayer and others I was not aware of, such as VLC, 7-Zip and WinZip. It is easy is to have vulnerable software running on your computer. If you are not using anything to keep track of software updates, try PSI, you may be surprised. PSI does a good job on detecting software that needs to be updated, so I heartily recommend it.

There is a on-line version available but the installable client is much more capable. The scanning process is a bit resource intensive, so I would suggest you run it periodically (say once a week) rather than letting it permanently run, which is it's default setting.