Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 2.0

The Secunia PSI is a FREE security tool designed to detectvulnerable andout-dated programs and plug-ins which expose your PC to attacks. Attacks exploiting vulnerable programs and plug-ins are rarely blocked by traditional anti-virus and are therefore increasingly "popular" among criminals.

Announcement: here
Current version: 2.0
Latest release: 20th Dec, 2010
File size: 1,738,952 bytes

Change log:

More info: Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI)
Download: Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) 2.0

 

thx for the notice

 

thank you very much for the heads up! much appreciated.

 

Automatic program updates are nice but Secunia PSI is bloatware now

 

In what respect ? I love this program, it often finds outdated programs. I just scanned my pc, it took 52 secs, 2 % cpu, and 27mb ram.
I wouldn't be without it
Thanks for the update

 

I am happy with the results of this "bloatware".

Gerard

 

how so? it does what has always been its core goal, keeping software up to date, not like its added a defragger and a system backup function to it or something lol...

 

The program is a very good supplement to securing your system. And you can use it as an on demand program. Can you tell use why it's bloatware
now

 

Correct, I personally use it solely on-demand. When I first started to use it, I used to run it in real-time, but it is "heavy" (not bloated) indeed, no system lags or anything but just too much RAM consumption.

 

Any idea, what are its requirements (windows services, runtime software and such), I would really like to try it out, so far it just is not responding.

 

A nice to have tool; very useful.

 

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/system_requirements/


Supported Operating Systems (32 & 64 bit):
Microsoft Windows 7
Microsoft Windows Vista SP 1 or later
Microsoft Windows XP - SP 3
Privileges
To install and run the Secunia PSI you require administrative privileges.

Connectivity
Access to Secunia's encrypted servers via SSL (https://psi.secunia.com:443/) and access to Microsoft Windows Update servers, see also Software Requirements below

Software Requirements
The latest version of Microsoft Update. You can determine whether or not you are running the latest version by visiting update.microsoft.com. If you are able to check your system for missing updates through this tool, your system should function properly with the Secunia PSI.

Hardware Requirements:
There are no additional hardware requirements. If your computer runs any of the above mentioned Operating Systems, then Secunia PSI should work.

 

Great GUI and love the auto update feature.

 

Just a note, it needs the Workstation service running in order to work.

 

I'm trying the program now. I like the service it provides, but it also added three auto-starts to my system; Secunia PSI Agent, Secunia PSI Tray, Secunia Update Agent. Can I disable all of them if I just want to run Secunia PSI on demand?

 

Yes you can. Just make sure the real-time monitoring is disabled.

 

Minor upgrade from 2.0.0.2001 (20/12/2010) to 2.0.0.3001 (10/01/2011).

Fixed some bugs.

ftp://ftp.secunia.com/PSISetup.exe

Rules.

 

Thanks just updated.

 

Secunia PSI is becoming bloatware.

* requiring several Windows services to be running. The ones needed by Microsoft Update are to be expected, but why is Workstation being required as well? Plus, there is no warning in the Secunia PSI webpage about the requirement of the Workstation service.

* adding several startup entries by default and its own service. Such measures were taken probably in order to make possible for the app to run without UAC prompting in Win Vista/Seven, apart from enabling PSI "monitoring" features. But the memory footprint/CPU cycles consumed by Secunia PSI aren't negligible, even when it's supposed to be idle.

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To check for updates, KC SUMo is still better than all other options IMO. Just make sure to not select any special offer during the installation wizard.

 

Thanks for posting. I was asking myself why PSI was not working right on my boxes, now I know. I also agree about SUMo being a better choice right now, even if possibly (b)adwared.

 

Strange, I've got Workstation service disabled (Win7x64) Ultimate and PSI runs fine, although i only run it on-demand and no automatic anything enabled.

 

The downloads from Free of all sponsors download links : have nothing other than the program.

 

Interesting, I was told on Secunia to enable it and when I did, it started to work, otherwise I could not even launch it, there are probably some other dependencies as well.
Anyway PSI is just a security updater, SUMo is a software updater, so it is much more usefull, though I wish, it could be set up to check for updates at startup and shutdown.

 

Thanks J_L. I was already using those clean files, but the problem is that the majority of people won't ever know of this. We only have to hope that they will be able to use wisely the regularly laced installer...

 

I installed PSI 2 on an XP SP3 system. Here are my observations:

PSI will not run without an internet connection, so you cannot use the GUI in general or change your settings if you are offline. That to me is broken as designed

PSI forces a scan of all drives/partitions the first time it is run, so you cannot change any settings until after the first scan is run. On my system it scanned all nine partitions and took forever. Another BAD in my opinion. Please let me decide what gets scanned and when.

The PSI Drives tab in Settings may be empty and if so, there is no way to select which drives you want scanned. Secunia confirmed that this was a bug.

When adding Ignore Rules, the GUI is very slow in responding. At first, I thought there was a problem until the rule finally appeared.

I do not like the way PSI is implemented and will only use it on demand if I decide to keep it around. I don't care about end-of-life or old versions.

My main reason for using PSI is to see what programs are considered insecure. Does KC Sumo have such a feature?

Al