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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Secunia’s Auto-patching Tool Gets Makeover

Summary: Secunia released Personal Software Inspector 3.0, a Windows tool that auto-patches third-party software and supports programs from more than 3,000 vendors, adding configurable settings, update history, drive selection, and rules to ignore specific programs that were absent from the beta. The release coincided with Secunia's May 2012 scan data naming Java JRE 1.6/6.x (31% unpatched, 83% market share, 51 CVEs), Apple QuickTime 7.x (35% unpatched, 60% market share, 46 CVEs), and Adobe Shockwave Player 11.x (67% unpatched, 31% market share, 50 CVEs) as the most exposed programs.

Bottom line: The tool's own author reported PSI 3.0 stalling for roughly eight minutes and consuming most of a Windows 7 machine's memory and processing power, and Secunia's Morten R. Stengaard said the company could not reproduce it despite more than 100,000 beta users. An auto-patcher that can hang a system is a hard trade against the exposure it addresses, where Shockwave Player 11.x alone sat 67% unpatched.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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