 | By Ryan Russell In my July 26 column, I invited readers to use Windows Secrets’ link to test their PCs with Secunia.com’s free Software Inspector. I’m happy this week to present the results and answer the many questions this generated from our readers. |
Results show Web plug-ins are vulnerable
Software Inspector scans your PC (with your permission) and reports on programs, including Windows itself, that have old, nonsecure versions installed on your PC. Through an affiliate relationship with Windows Secrets, we were allowed to see the 10 programs that were the least updated — and therefore the most likely to be nonsecure — among the PCs that were tested by our paid readers.
The link to Software Inspector that I provided in my previous column was clicked more than 12,000 times by readers in the first week alone. We don’t know how many of those visitors went on to run an actual scan of their PCs. (Secunia doesn’t collect or report any personal information, nor would we want the company to.) But a huge number of readers surely took advantage of the free service.
I looked at Secunia’s list of the 10 software products that Windows Secrets readers are running nonupdated versions of. (Software Inspector only tells you about vulnerable software that has a more-secure version available.)
Here’s the list, in descending order, starting with the applications that have the greatest number of flawed, nonupdated instances on readers’ machines (before they ran the scan and, I hope, updated the apps that needed it):
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