Find Outdated, Insecure Apps Quickly

I came a cross a free new online service from Secunia, a company that produces business security products and does a fair bit of threat research. Head to secunia.com/software_inspector with either Firefox (1.5 and up), IE (6 and up) or Opera 9 and the online tool will scan your system for common programs like browsers, e-mail apps and media players and tell you which ones are out-of-date and potentially unsafe. It will check your version of Windows, too.

It's a useful service, since many of the scanned-for apps are often targeted by online attacks, and you'll get a link to download updates for any old programs. But of course there's a gotcha, since nothing in the world of computer security is entirely smooth and easy, it seems.

It's no fault of Secunia's, but some apps, like the Macromedia Flash Player and Sun Java, leave old versions of their software around after you upgrade. And those old versions show up as unsafe in the Secunia scan. There were five or six old Java versions on my PC, for instance, that I had to manually remove using Add/Remove programs. I'm still working on clearing the old Flash bits.