Love me tools; love me tool lists as well, especially with new things. The Security Mentor himself was right, this list is pretty cool and has some things I didn’t know about! If you look closely, pretty much under each of the ten entries are links to MORE similar free tools. Here are the ones that caught my eye. Note that the list is centered on Windows.

Secunia Personal Software Inspector – Holy crap! This is an awesome-sounding tool because trying to keep up with what is patched and what is out of date is one of the least-talked about futile and frustrating efforts in the IT back room! I think this one is going to be a priority to try out this weekend. I don’t know about licensing, but I bet you can buy just one copy for business and use it on a base workstation image that has all your applications installed, then use it as your reference. That’s money right there!

GMER anti-rootkit – This tool looks really cool, and if it doesn’t require an actual installation routine, will likely make it into my desktop toolkit alongside Spybot, Sysinternals tools, and so on. If it requires an install, it could still be useful as another incident response investigation tool. Now, someone needs to make Tripwire free on Windows…

File Shredder – I like the idea of File Shredder, but I’m not sure I really need it. It’s not like I am storing illegal or hugely private junk on my systems, and I certainly have no intentions of selling or giving away my disks anytime soon (like any geek, I can and will find uses for everything). Still, it’s nice to have one in the pocket if the need arises.

Other tools are iffy to me. I’m not a huge fan of loading my web browser with toolbars and plugins. Anything extremely useful really should get built into the browser eventually. I like seeing more options for IE, especially since my love for Firefix has dwindled as it has gotten bigger, slower, and buggier in the past year. Yes, loading up Firefox with testing/security plugins is awesome, but that’s a special purpose and I don’t need to browse with them always loaded. The only ones I use regularly are NoScript (only recently!), Tor, a client banner changer (I can’t think of the damned name for it right now!), and a plugin that displays the target site IP address at the bottom.

For web privacy stuff, just learn how to empty the cache and where else stuff is stored along with browser and OS tracking options. Yeah, that’s not enough, but I’ve got a bias against cleaners. For new system crapware, learn how to welcome your new system into your home with a quick enema (format and reinstall).