COMPUTER SECURITY

The following, transcribed from Computer World, is good advice for you all computer owners. I strongly suggest that you download this free utility program.

It will help you upgrade any of your sofware programs which are not safe from hackers attacks, (because you forgot to install security patches) :

Since Nov. 25, when PSI left beta and entered Version 1.0, more than 120,000 people downloaded the utility, said Thomas Kristensen, Secunia's chief technology officer. The company randomly selected 20,000 of those installations, then tallied the number of unpatched applications PSI found.
"Most people keep Windows up to date," said Kristensen, "because it's so easy to use Windows Update. Adobe Reader and Flash and Apple QuickTime are like that, too, as are browsers. But a lot of third-party [browser] plug-ins don't have any [update mechanism] and so people don't keep them updated."
The PSI data showed that while fewer than 1.9% of the users had a completely clean PC, 30.3% of the machines contained between one and five unpatched programs, 25.1% had between six and 10 at-risk applications, and 45.8% of the systems boasted 11 or more insecure programs.
Wednesday's numbers were even more dismal than those Secunia collected last January, when it surveyed a similar number of PCs that had just installed PSI. Then, approximately 4.5% of the machines were free of unpatched programs, more than twice as many as in the newest survey.
Kristensen explained the decline. "We've had a change in the user base, and managed to reach a much broader group of users," he said. PSI's early adopters were mostly tech-savvy types, Kristensen argued, but as word has spread about the utility, "it's reached a completely different group of users, many who never patch their PCs," he added.
Since Secunia brought the free utility out of beta test, the Copenhagen-based company claims about 900,000 users have downloaded the program. "We should clear one million around the first of the year," Kristensen said.
PSI runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Server 2003 and can be downloaded from the Secunia site.