Secunia Software Inspector

Almost everyone uses WindowsUpdate to keep their Microsoft products up to date, but what about all the other applications that you have on your system? Secunia, the well-known security research company, has a new web-based scanner:

The Secunia Software Inspector relies on carefully crafted “Secunia File Signatures” to recognise applications on your system. The detected applications are then matched against our “Secunia Advisory Intelligence” to determine whether an application is up-to-date or not. The results are then used to advise you on how to update to more secure releases of the insecure applications.

Microsoft Windows Update is used to determine if your system is missing security updates from Microsoft.

The Secunia Software Inspector covers the most common/popular end user applications:
* Internet browsers
* Internet browser plugins
* Instant messaging clients
* Email clients
* Media players
* Operating systems

It uses a Java applet, so it works in Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. I’m pretty active at keeping my system up-to-date. I just ran it and it took about 3 minutes to do a complete scan. It recognized about a dozen different programs that I had installed, and told me that QuickTime, Flash, and Java all had updates. I installed the updates and then reran the scan, and I’m all up to date now.

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