Understanding Best Practices for Application Software

In this video, we’re going over understanding best practises for application software. Now, it’s just as important to update your application software on a regular basis as it is your operating system. The reason for that is there’s vulnerabilities coming off your application software every day. These exploits range from crashing your computer, stealing your files, gaining complete control of your computer. So considering how many application softwares we typically have on our computer, this is a huge vulnerability that we need to take care of. Now, if you installed it on your computer, you should always keep it up to date. If you don’t need certain application software on your computer, you should always remove it.

Now, for Windows computers, it can be kind of hard to update your software. So let’s take a look at an easy way to do this. Now, for Windows, you can go to a website called Ninite. It’s N-I-N-I-T-E .com. And it’s a freemium model. So the way this works is, you can look in here, and these are the free programmes you can instal here. So say I want Chrome, Firefox, CDBurner software, Notepad++, K Kodak lite video programme, and KeePass 2 and the 7-Zip. Now, making sure some of these are programmes I don’t have, and some are programmes I do have.

Now, the way this works is, we can go through here, we could check any number of these programmes, whether we have them or not. And if we’re on to Windows 8, 8.1, Windows 10 machine, it doesn’t matter, because this is going to update the system. It’s going to find out what operating system we have for Windows, if it’s 32-bit, 64-bit, and pull down the appropriate software. So I’m going to go ahead and scroll to the bottom here. We’re going to click on this “Get Your Ninite” file. OK, and I’m going to save the file here. And I’m going to go ahead and run the file.

Now, if we look in here, the file is only about 415 kilobytes, even though I added a bunch of programmes on there. This is just a reference file. It’s telling the computer, “Go out to these sites, check for the new version, go in and run it silently”. So let’s go ahead and try it.

OK, I’m going to say yes, go ahead and run this. And let me do the “show details” so you can see what’s going on. So I already have Firefox, so it checked it, said it’s up to date. My Chrome is out of date, so it’s actually installing an update to it. 7-Zip is up to date. I don’t have Notepad++ on this VM, so let’s go ahead and– it’s going to go ahead and install this. So you see it’s looking for programmes that I don’t have, going out and updating it. Programmes I do have, it’s going to go ahead and update it for me. Now for Programmes that aren’t on this list, or if you’re running a different operating system,

you are going to have to do it the harder way: go out and find the individual programmes. But again, considering the vulnerabilities out there that are constantly coming down and being exploited, it’s absolutely important to go ahead and update these on a regular basis. But again, if you have Windows, this is a pretty good route to go because it’s pretty easy to use. I can close this. And I don’t have to create a new file every time for this. If I wanted to run this again, say a week down the line, I just run the same file. And I don’t have to keep downloading it. It’s always going to go out and look for the newest version of that software.

And again, you can find that over on N-I-N-I-T-E .com. And it’s a free service. There is a paid version, a pro version, that gives you access to more programmes, which is good for enterprise. But for home users and some business stuff, this is also a good way to go. So final key points, we want to make sure that– remember, our operating system and our application software are just as vulnerable. To some point, our application software is even more vulnerable because we tend to have more of them. Always keep things up to date, whether using Ninite or manually going out and updating your software. If you don’t need it, remove it. Audit your application software on a regular basis.

If you no longer need that software, remove it. Removing that software is going to reduce your attack surface by quite a bit. So this was about patch management, and next up we’ll be taking a look at why a firewall is important. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video.