mgroves

If you’re like me and you don’t have an IT department for your home network with rigorous security standards, you need to be even more vigilant when it comes to security, because you have no one to blame but yourself.

I’ve been using Secunia PSI (Personal Software Inspector) for some time now, and I’ve found it to be an excellent product for identifying out-of-date and insecure programs. Not only does it identify programs that need updated, but also how to update them, how to patch them, and even specific forum threads if I have a problem getting the update to take. It handles insecure, end-of-life, and even browser security. In “advanced” mode, I can see at a glance what needs updating, how serious the threat is, links to patches/updates, and links to the forum thread:

(Note that screenshot was taken before I had run Windows Update on a new box).

It’s always surprising to me what Secunia is able to find that I wouldn’t have found on my own. For instance, PhpStorm (an excellent PHP IDE, by the way) comes with a copy of Java (JRE) for convenience, but the JRE gets updated frequently and PhpStorm doesn’t update the JRE on its own. I had no idea the JRE was there until Secunia found it and told me it was out of date and a 4/5 threat rating. Simple solution: delete the outdated JRE and PhpStorm was able to find the updated version on my system with no problem.