We recently held a Cyber Insurance and Cyber Security webinar and had an opportunity to speak with Lewis Pope, a Head Nerd at N-able. N-able is a leading provider of network management systems and tools and a key partner for MTSi. One of the key points Lewis made was about the importance of a centralized system for managing patches and updates to protect your environment against cyber criminals. “A lot of people think updates are automatically taken care of by Windows,” Lewis said. “But a large percentage of attacks are taking advantage of vulnerabilities in systems where a patch or an update has been released for months, but not applied. If the update was applied, the vulnerability would not have existed and the attack would not have been successful.”
Pope cautions about relying on Windows Update. “Windows Update fails more than you realize,” Pope said. “You could have a system in your environment that hasn’t been doing successful updates for months or years.”
He continued to say that without a central system for checking on updates, a company is blind to the patching status of end user systems until someone with the skills and experience works to investigate.
At MTSi, we know patching is a critical component of cyber security. That’s why managed patching is part of every managed service program we deliver. Our team uses a centralized tool to review patches as they are released, schedule them into a patching window for the least impact to your team, and then to check to make sure important patches are applied.
If you have a cyber insurance policy, you should check the exclusions for language about the time to install software patches. Some carriers are beginning to exclude coverage (meaning they won’t pay) for incidents resulting where a patch has been released that would have prevented the breach.
If you’d like to know more about software patching, contact our sales team! [email protected] or call 508.324.9475