Software vulnerabilities and updates

The Flash vulnerability last week that was initially thought to be a zero day, but was eventually categorized as a known issue that was already patched in the latest flash version got me to thinking. I know what you are going to say, and yes there was initially some smoke, and a slight headache, but eventually I recovered. OS patches are usually up to date on all of my systems, but there are so many ubiquitous applications on systems that there should be an easy way to check if they are up to date. Well Secunia has one. For those of you that don't know about this organization, they have for several years now delivered top notch vulnerability and patching information for any OS or application I can think of for free. Now they have leveraged that database of known insecure programs into both a personal and corporate edition of what they call a software vulnerability scanner. The personal edition is free, and uses their database to check applications on your computer to see if there are known vulnerabilities. The software does not perform a vulnerability assessment, it checks for known vulnerable versions, and in most cases provides a link to download the latest version. The software tries to launch in startup by default, but this is easily changed. Give this a try and you will probably be amazed at the vulnerable applications residing on even the most up-to-date system.