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Let’s be honest. We’ve all had it happen.
You’re working away on your computer and in the lower right corner a dialogue box pops up.It gives you the options of restarting your computer now, in 10 minutes, or to remind you in a day. More often than not you click the “remind later” option.Other times you power on your device that’s running Windows, expecting to get to your work right away, only to watch all of your pages and programs close so your device can restart and update.It’s frustrating and a short-term headache.However, not going through with these updates, known as patches, can lead to long-term pain points, like getting hacked.And no one wants to get hacked.
So, what is patching?
Patching is the process of updating your software and or operating systems with a piece of code.When an issue is found within a software or an operating system, vendors will push out these patches to devices, resulting in those dialogue boxes that pop up on your device.However, if an issue is discovered and made public if there isn’t a patch immediately available, a race between the hacker and the software or operating system vendor is on to see who can exploit or correct the issue first. For Microsoft updates, they operate their patching releases on a day referred to as Patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of every month and it’s when Microsoft rolls out their security patches for software and operating systems. When it comes to managing these patches, vendors are usually on the ball when pushing them out based on when they find the glitches.
However, if a hacker exploits a vulnerability that vendors weren’t able to identify initially, vendors must go back and reissue a patch to correct that vulnerability in order to safeguard from any damage being done to devices. Did you know that most cyber attacks are made to devices that have not gone through proper patching? On many of these systems, the patching is available, it just has not been applied.
Managing patches as they are rolled out is a best practice in taking the precautionary steps to protect your devices from having your business’s valuable data vulnerable to hacking. At Access Systems, our team of experts monitors and manages critical patches to ensure customers’ systems are up to date and fully patched as part of our Total IT Care and Information Security Essential services. For Microsoft, patches rated critical and important, the team at Access Systems reviews and approves these patches for release and rolls them out. Securing IT is of utmost importance and if you can take the steps to combating cyber threats with a simple software patch, why not do so? Besides, having to wait five minutes for a computer reboot in the short-run is a much better outcome than having files stolen in the long run.
