Secunia PSI - A way to scan for vulnerable and end of live software

Posted by TheNerd
May 29, 2008

Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) is a neat little application that scans your PC and informs you about outdated (only if it contains vulnerabilities), end-of-life and vulnerable software. Basically what it does is scans your PC (sort of like a virus scanner) and then creates a report of the software that needs attention.

When I first scanned my computer it was rated at 85% (the percentage of software that is “safe”). It took me a while, but in about three quarters of an hour I had all the software on my Windows XP install  updated and had my results up to 98% (I still have some software in Vista that needs updating).

The neat part is that it also provides you a direct link to downloads of new software versions  and if there aren’t any downloads it provides fairly detailed info on how to fix it if possible.

The current version is RC2 and it is free for personal use. Please be aware that this software stays in contact with a database at Secunia to provide up-to-date information about vulnerable and end-of-life software. If that concerns you then maybe you would want to stay away from this product.

If you are interested in giving it a try go to psi.secunia.com. I’ve include some screenshots of the applicaton below.

Secunia PSI Screenshot 2 Secunia PSI Screenshot 1

PS> I heard about this on Security Now…

Microsoft, Security, Sofware

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Comments

I really haven’t heard of this software but by your article, I think it is pretty neat. I have 2 PC with XP and Vista, So I will try it on XP first and see how it goes.

Thanks for the link!
Chris

Comment by Chris on June 1, 2008 @ 12:30 am

I’ve got this running on all my PCs and I was really surprised what I found to be vulnerable and out of date.

I found Flash was the worst product. I had to update the IE and Firefox plugins manually and also had to manually patch some files that were scatter out through the Windows\system and system32 folders.

Nothing too major though.

Comment by TheNerd on June 1, 2008 @ 4:49 pm

I’ll have to try it out on an older PC first to see what it does. Too bad they dont have a server version to check hosted website apps.

Comment by Dave on August 5, 2008 @ 10:14 pm
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