Wednesday, June 23, 2010

A useful free security program....


I've just discovered this on MajorGeeks.com and installed it on both my PCs, and then ran it on each of them, and it found a couple of insecure programs on one and three on the other. When it finds one, it also provides you with a link to the program provider's home page where you can download the patch or the update to cure the insecurity in it, so as you go through the process of scanning, looking at the results, and downloading the fixes and installing them, and lastly doing a final confirmation scan to make sure everything is fixed, you've solved the security problems found by this little program. The ones found by its simple version anyway. There's an advanced interface for those who want to dig deeper. For now, however, I suggest you get this and try it, because it will tell you if you have out-of-date programs on your computer which are the most vulnerable to attack by hackers and malware.

Most of us have between 50 and 70 or 80 programs installed on our computers and how many of us think to review each of those regularly to make sure we have the latest updated versions of them? - Exactly - None of us do that! So this little program is a must-have, because it does a quick scan and lists any programs that need updating, or are at the end of their life-cycle and need to be replaced. It does what we never think of doing for ourselves. So if you have this, and use it periodically, it keeps you more secure than you are now.


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4 comments:

  1. Hey Ray..


    Thanks for the security tip...I installed Secunia PSI...and after their initial scan I was 91 % secure...

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  2. You're welcome!

    Seems like a good thing to have.

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  3. So, how does it know what needs to be patched. I mean, does it go on-line and look at "every" program that you have installed? Good trick.

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  4. @ Tommy -

    I think it does do something like that, Tommy. I know it needs access to the internet to be able to work properly, so that's probably what it does. It is probably comparing your present version numbers to those of the latest ones from a list at its home page. It doesn't take very long to do the checking, so it likely isn't checking actual program sites, but is probably using a list already prepared.

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