General Discussions

The EMET is something you can skip. It's basically there to enforce all programs to use ASLR (If you got DEP enabled, that should be sufficient enough). I would not use this tool for trainers and games at all (it jumbles the address spaces so that malware designed to exploit things to get to privileged memory does not work. It'll cause all sorts of havock with trainers that rely on knowing which address to use). If I were you, I would just skip the EMET step completely.

Yes plugins are absolutely essential to keep up to date. Java and Adobe software are extremely popular vectors for malware to exploit. If these are up-to-date, malware that exploits earlier versions of the plug-in will not execute properly and become a dud (and your AV doesn't even have to do any work). If they are plug-ins you use, you should keep them.

For the secunia, you can use the PSI on a personal license (which is free). It does look very business like because many businesses do use secunia to keep their programs up to date. It's a useful tool to ensure your programs are up-to-date. If you're a minimalist (use a standard set of programs you're happy with and nothing more), then you can probably get by without it. If you choose not to use it, you will have to check every so often to see if your programs do have updates via their websites or whatever.

If you want to use EMET I would simply use it on your internet browser if it's something other than IE (Microsoft already has it enabled by default for IE). That's really the weakest point in terms of attackers exploiting things. Nothing else really interacts with the internet the way that a browser does to warrant needing EMET to force that protection.

[Edited by Neo7, 5/11/2012 2:07:05 PM]