Detecting potential security risks in your installed software - Secunia PSI

[IainB]

I am usually scouting round for new PC security and performance monitoring software, and trialling it out.
I stumbled on a blog post by someone who claimed to put a great deal of faith in Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI). I had never heard of it, though I found it referred to in some old discussions on the DC forum.

PSI is free to download for personal/non-commercial users from the secunia.com website: Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI)
So, I downloaded PSI and have had it running for a few weeks now. It does what it says it will do, and is rather impressive - seems to be quite rigorous.          
In particular, I found these useful:

• The identification of "Insecure" software on your PC - i.e., software versions for which there are known security updates available.
• The identification of "End-of-Life" software on your PC - i.e., software versions which the vendor no longer supports.
• A percentage rating of your PC software security status, mapped over time in a little histogram, so you can see whether things have improved after you have made some of the recommended changes to your PC's risky software.

PSI offers solutions for the risky software, taking you to appropriate links for the software suppliers' updates (where there are any).

Hoping this this might be of use/help to somebody.

[40hz]

@IainB - Terrific recommendation!

+1. Excellent utility. Big fav of mine. It's been around for a while now. And each update has only made it better. I'm surprised more people don't know about or use Secunia PSI.

The only thing you may want to do is turn off the autostart feature and run it as an on-demand application. If you scan your PC regularly with PSI, there's really no need to keep it constantly active in the background. On some older or underpowered machines it can cause minor stability/performance issues.

[IainB]

@40hz: Yes, PSI is really rather good isn't it?. The potential stability/performance issues were in my mind too. I had considered leaving PSI out of my startup components, but as it contributes only 5 seconds of my boot-up time and does not seem to be an annoying CPU or disk I/O overhead on my laptop (Intel Core Duo 1.8Ghz), I have left it in boot for the meantime. I may yet prune it out and only run it intermittently on demand - or maybe schedule it as a periodic job.

[bgd77]

I too use it and it is a terrific recommendation. I thought everybody knew about it. 

[wiiiindy]

  I took it out of startup and usually run it after the Tuesday Microsoft updates.  It confirms the MS updates and then notifies me about everything else.   Helped me notice that anything from Adobe seems to require frequent security updates (one of reasons I switched to Foxit Reader - best move I made in a long time).

[Idenusa]