The final version of Secunia Personal Software Inspector (PSI) was released last week. During that time the software Secunia claim it has been installed on more than 120,000 PCs worldwide.

Statistics from a sample of 20,000 users who have downloaded either the beta or the final version have showed that 98.1 per cent have one or more insecure programs installed on their Windows machines. The figures are taken from the initial PC scan before they have a chance to apply remedial patches.

Statistics have showed that a 30% of the users were running between 1-5 insecure programs, while a 25% were caught out with between 6-10 packages that need patching on their systems. Almost 50% had more than 11 insecure software packages.

The latest scan tool stats are even worse than figures obtained back in January, when Secunia carried out much the same number crunching exercise using figures from users of the then beta version of its scanning tool. Back at the start of the year 4.54% of users were running a fully patched PC compared to two per cent now.

The percentage of surfers with between one and five insecure package on their windows boxes has increased to 30 per cent now, compared to 27.8 per cent in January 2008.

More and more internet attacks take advantage of application vulnerabilities rather than flaws in underlying operating systems. That means that keeping patches up to date is becoming more important. Running a personal firewall and up-to-date anti-virus is no longer enough to come anywhere close to assuring a safe surfing experience.

Secunia's PSI utility - available at no charge to consumers - scans Windows systems to log applications that need patching or are out of date. Links to patches downloads and more info are provided. It's a neat utility which is highly recommended by ZDnet, PC World and Cnet Downloads.

To download Secunia's free personal edition click on the link.