Today I accidentally stumbled upon a very cool piece of software, the Secunia Personal Software Inspector. It performs in-depth analysis of your system and reports possible software vulnerabilities and end-of-life software. It is similar in concept to the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, but reports on a wide range software programs. I’m pretty paranoid about security on my PCs, but I tried it out anyway expecting it to not find any problems. Secunia is well known vulnerability reporting entity, so I trust their database is pretty broad and accurate.
After running the scan I was surprised to see my machine had a few issues! As it turns out, nLite included a vulnerable version of a zip compression library, Adobe Bridge and Logitech Harmony software both had old versions of Flash Player. I also had an old Sysinternals tool that was vulnerable as well. Through the slick GUI I was able to easily download and fix most of the problems. Bridge and Harmony software needed manual fixing (copying the latest flash DLL to their directories), but that was very easy.
For you more technical folks, make sure you go into the Settings page and un-check the "Show only Easy-to-Patch programs", so you get a full listing of all potential security problems.
In today’s world, it’s nearly impossible to make sure your system is up to date. I watch security bulletins like a hawk, but most of my PC problems were due to 3rd party components that some packages included which were outdated. I submitted security reports to both nLite and Logitech, so hopefully they will ship the latest zip and Flash components with their products.
I highly recommend you download and try out the software. I can just about guarantee it will find one or more problems with your PC. After just a few minutes of my time, I resolved all problems.
