PKGS-7398 - Package audit tool

Software packages are an important part of the system, including its primary goal and duties. On a daily basis, new security flaws are found, many which will affect the ones we have installed. These flaws, also named software vulnerabilities, can cause a lot of troubles for your system. This is especially true when such a software package can be remotely attacked and misused. A successful could result into your system starting to send spam messages, leak confidential data, or become part of a botnet.

With a package audit tool it is easy to find which packages need to be updated. In most cases packages will be flagged with a security warning when a known vulnerability has been fixed. Newer distributions usually have an audit option as part of the package manager. For other systems, a little bit of research is needed to discover a way to find vulnerable packages. For example the yum-security package is an example used for older systems running RHEL, Fedora, or CentOS.