A Closer Look at Patching
In this lesson, we'll take an up-close look at patching.
We'll cover the following...
Patching is the broccoli and spinach and push-ups of security. It’s not glamorous. You won’t get to do a talk at a prestigious conference from it. You’ll never be finished, either. But it’s one of the fundamental practices you need in place to keep the bad guys out.
Patching is the ongoing practice of the following:
- Looking at what software you have in place
- Researching what vulnerabilities have been discovered in that software
- Upgrading the vulnerable software to secure versions
- Testing to make sure that the new versions work
This defense is a lot of work, but what’s nice about it is that we don’t have to become security experts overnight to implement it. We just need to be experts in our own systems.
Patching and the Equifax breach
One of the most widely discussed breaches of 2017 was the Equifax breach, in which hackers accessed the sensitive personal information of approximately 145.5 million Americans. We can learn a lot about the importance of ...