ARCHIVED: Secunia software inspection products at IU

• Overview
• Privacy notice
• Departmental use

Overview

Secunia software inspection products, available for Windows and macOS operating systems, help you identify the software installed on your computer and keep it up to date. The application scans your computer for thousands of known programs, checks for missing security patches and vulnerabilities in those programs, and reports back to you with information on how to update them.

Indiana University's University Information Policy Office (UIPO) has licensed Secunia products to assist students who have difficulty ensuring programs they have tried to remove (for example, peer-to-peer file sharing programs) have actually been removed. These UIPO notification services are only offered when the IU version of PSI is installed through IUware or Group Policy Object. Installations of PSI from Secunia's website do not allow for reporting from the UIPO.

IU students, faculty, and staff can download Secunia from IUware free of charge.

Privacy notice

The Secunia application examines only the software programs on your computer (not your personal files), and then sends information to Secunia's servers, which match the data against the Secunia File Signatures engine to determine the exact software programs you have installed. All data sent to Secunia is communicated via an encrypted connection (SSL), and is treated as confidential. For details, see Secunia's Privacy Statement.

Additionally, the IUware and Group Policy Object versions of PSI automatically install Secunia Corporate Software Inspector (CSI), a silent service with no graphical user interface. CSI sends information only about the software programs on your computer (not your personal files) to UIPO, rather than to Secunia. All data sent to IU is communicated via an encrypted connection (SSL), and is used to send notifications about software security risks requiring attention to users on the IU network and, for university-owned computers, users' departmental IT Pros. If your IT Pro has opted to receive notices regarding personally owned machines of users the IT Pro supports, then the IT Pro is required to notify the users supported.

Departmental use

IT Pros who wish to deploy CSI via Group Policy Object (GPO) can link to the "IU-UISO-CSI" GPO. Departments choosing to implement CSI through this GPO will be able to take advantage of reports and notifications of vulnerable software applications from UIPO. IU IT Pros who deploy CSI agents to systems should provide notification to the users describing who will use the tool, how, and for what purpose, as well as anticipated use of the resulting information.

Additionally, the UIPO licensed Secunia Corporate Software Inspector (CSI) provides IT professionals with an easy way to monitor software vulnerabilities. For more, see UIPO's Personal & Corporate Software Inspector.