Secunia Launches Free Software Automatic Updating Solution

Danish vulnerability research and management vendor Secunia has released version 2.0 of its Personal Software Inspector (PSI) product, which is capable of installing patches for outdated applications automatically.

Version 1.x of Secunia Personal Software Inspector determines the version of all EXE and DLL files on the computer and check it against the company's database of over 30,000 operating systems, applications and appliances.

It also leverages the vendor's vulnerability intelligence data to determine the criticality of updates and provide download links to them.

The new PSI 2.0 released yesterday takes things a step further and can automatically deploy updates for the most popular applications. This can even be done silently, without all the notifications and hassle updating processes normally entail.

"Users generally don't want to, nor should they have to, be worried about security updates for the programs they have installed. Instead, users should be assisted in receiving security updates as seamlessly as possible," says Jakob Balle, vice president of product development at Secunia.

The company exemplifies the product's efficiency with data gathered during the beta testing period, which started at the beginning of September.

Statistics show that 37% PSI 2.0 beta users received updates for Adobe Flash Player through the program instead of directly from the vendor.

For Java the percentage was even higher, 47%, while 24% Adobe Reader users got their patches installed by PSI 2.0.

These are even considered "best case scenario" because users who volunteered to test a security product in advance, are most likely security conscious.

With the new version Secunia also opened an Application Programming Interface (API) for third-party developers to extend the program with customized views, benchmarks, statistics and other apps.

The latest version of Secunia Personal Software Inspector can be downloaded from here.