F-Secure Health Check 2.0 Beta Ditches ActiveX

Martin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:08:31 +0000

F-Secure Health Check is a web application that can perform a health check of a local Microsoft Windows operating system. A health check is basically divided into three areas of interest that are checked and an assessment in the end that lists possible solutions to the problems encountered. Area one will check for installed security software and display information about their state, e.g. if an anti-virus software or desktop firewall is installed and turned on.

Area two will do the same for backup software. It will list installed backup software and inform the user about the state that the installations are in. Area three which is probably the most interesting one to many Windows users will check various critical software programs and compare their version with the one in the F-Secure database. Health Check in this step checks programs like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the Adobe Flash plugin, Mozilla’s Firefox or Sun’s Java runtime.

The information in the solution tab obviously depend on the results of the system scan. A solve button will be displayed if problems have been found in one of the areas that have been investigated by the program. The solutions do fall a bit short, at least in the security tab as the program suggests to use F-Secure products to solve the problem.

It is only natural that a company wants to promote their products. The web application would however be useful to more users if they would have added some choice to the diagnosis. The new beta version of F-Secure Health Check 2 has ditched Microsoft’s ActiveX technology for Java. This means that it is now compatible with a wider range of Internet browsers. The developers list Internet Explorer and Firefox only but it has been successfully tested with Google Chrome as well which increases the chance that other web browsers that support Java will run the application fine as well.

Users who want to give F-Secure Health Check 2 Beta a try can go to the F-Secure website to run it from there.

Tags: f-secure, health check, Security, security check, security-software, web application

F-Secure Health Check

Martin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:43:27 +0000

Many companies are producing tools that scan the computer for security vulnerabilities. Some provide their functionality on a website while others are applications that have to be installed on the computer. F-Secure Health Check is a product of the first category. It provides access to a scanner that checks the operating system and installed applications for vulnerabilities and outdated versions. Unfortunately though the health check only runs on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or newer with Active X enabled.

An Active X control has to be downloaded prior to the scan. A health report is generated in the end that is displaying red, yellow and green icons in various categories. Red items are critical, yellow medium and green safe. My test results have been mixed. I did receive several red icons in some categories because of programs that were not included in my security concept. The red icon in the security products category for instance was there because of the disabled Windows Firewall and no other firewall that was installed.

It did not detect the hardware firewall of my router. What I want to say is that even though some elements are marked as insecure they might not be in your special case. Another example was the yellow icon in the Sending Mail category which was there because of an old backup version of Eudora 5 which I do not use anymore. I think I did receive a yellow rating because of two up-to-date email applications (Thunderbird and Outlook Express).

The most interesting categories in my opinion are the following two: Opening multimedia files and documents & Using other programs. It did detect some outdated applications (that I do not use regularly or forgot about). What I really like is the option to solve the issue right away by clicking on the solve button. This normally leads to a page where the updated application or patch can be downloaded.

It does not take long to update all the applications listed this way. F-Secure Health Check is an interesting service that excels in solving issues that have been found. A pity that it only works in Internet Explorer and that it requires Active X.

Tags: f-secure, health check, security-scan, vulnerability scan, windows scan

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F-Secure Health Check 2.0 Beta Ditches ActiveX

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