Before, During and After Patch Tuesday: A Survival Guide

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Before, During and After Patch Tuesday: A Survival Guide-4

After you’ve done the prep work to ensure a plan is in place for patching, you’re ready to take on Patch Tuesday. Do some research to determine what is expected to be released by Microsoft, Adobe, Java, Apple and other vendors that may affect your systems and determine how these patches will impact your organization. Don’t forget to review any internally developed applications or custom patches that may be needed. Keep your eyes open for pre-announcements from vendors that can help you do this prep work. Reserve time slots to deploy the patch updates. Mission-critical servers should be patched within 72 hours. Do a final scan of your machines prior to Patch Tuesday to make sure that everything is as up-to-date as it can be before the patches are released. Don’t forget that some patches won’t deploy if prior patches aren’t installed.

It’s been said that there are only two types of companies left in the world: those who know they’ve been hacked and those who don’t. We have to hope that there’s still a third group: those who have not been hacked. You can be sure those who belong to the third group are those who are rigorously implementing security features and, more importantly, keeping them updated.

Patching is not a highlight of the job, but it is a key – some might even say the key – to mitigating risk to your system and remediating vulnerabilities. Despite its importance, it is easy to let it fall by the wayside. To help make patching easier, Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst at Lumension, has come up with some simple tips to help your Patch Tuesday go by a little smoother and keep your systems up to date.

Related Topics : Network Security, Unified Threat Management

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