WATCH The Importance of Patching – Day 14 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2021
Shelly Miller 00:05
Craig, modern society gives us so many benefits with marvelous technologies like the ability to easily work from home on our laptops and our pads to be alerted on our phone when something’s delivered at our front door to, I don’t know, you pull up and you realize, Oh, well, you need more seed or window cleaner for our car, let’s just hit our phone and hit Amazon and get that ordered right away. And it’s wonderful, all of the technologies and the abilities that we have to quickly do the things we need to do today. But these, these conveniences require maintenance, just like your car needs an oil change, we have to maintain it. So we have to maintain our all of our technology so that it can stay safe and secure. What are some of the tips to keeping this amazing technology that we all get to use safe and secure?
Craig Taylor 00:57
Well, that’s that’s a great question. And I’m glad we’re talking about this because it often gets forgotten. And if you forget to change the oil in your car, your engine is ruined. If you forget to maintain all of these devices, you can be compromised, your data can be stolen by hackers or the device itself can be ruined. So let’s talk about that. Here’s a truism for all you folks listening, no software product ever written was perfect or free from mistakes. They all have things called bugs that are discovered by researchers and hackers alike. And when a vendor learns about a bug, they fix it. I want to start by going back in time, though, where did bug come from it because it’s what we call any software flaw today.
But Originally, it was found in the reference comes from Grace Hopper, IBM 1946, almost seven years ago, she was doing some troubleshooting of her room size computer that stopped working. And she tracked it back and put the cause of that problem in her journal that you see here. It was a moth that it got caught in a transistor. And so she wrote down in her journal bug led to failed computer failed problem. So that’s the origin for a lot of us in software and technology have the term bug but it now signifies problems or flaws in software.
So what do you do? What are your what should you be doing to keep your software whether it’s an ring on your front door, a tablet, a computer or a phone current safe and secure? Well patch, you have to patch it and upgrade it. That’s the topic for today’s conversation. So if you if you have desktops and servers in your business, you need to establish a monthly patching cycle because that’s about the frequency with which Microsoft comes out with patches, things of that nature. If it’s a mobile device, whether it’s an android or an iPhone, follow the vendors notifications, make sure you’re monitoring that you know general settings in an iPhone.
And if you get a new update, update it pretty quickly because as of late, Apple has released a lot of really important upgrades to fix vulnerabilities that could lead to your phone being compromised. On the Internet of Things which includes the TV and the refrigerator and video cameras surveillance systems, you really need to look at those vendors manually, sometimes once a quarter once every six months. And just install those updates as they come along. Some of them are getting smart and pushing the patch to you. And it’s you know, you’ll come in and your TV’s rebooted itself because it has applied the latest patch. But all of these things are really important for keeping your wonderful and marvelous technology working properly safe and secure.
Shelly Miller 03:57
Great points, great points. So tell us what happens if you don’t apply the patches.
Craig Taylor 04:03
If you don’t apply one of these patches, a lot of times it your your system will become unstable, or worse, it will be open to a hacker breaking in. If a hacker breaks into your laptop or desktop computer, they could hold you for ransom with ransomware a topic we’ve covered recently, they could steal your data and maybe even publish it online or extort you for a ransom in that way. Other times they can install remote access software so they can steal your logins and your credentials on a TV, perhaps they can turn on the microphone that listens into your conversations in your living room. So there’s a lot of different ways for hackers to break in. There’s another example of a hacker breaking into a nest wall unit that controls the heat and cooling in your house and turning the heat up or turning the AC up and wasting electricity. So there’s lots of different kinds of nuisances and some pretty significant problems. If you get breached because of not patching one of these devices, so it makes really good sense to have a strong patch management program for your business, and make sure it extends to mobile devices and the internet of things to keep yourself safe and secure.
Mike Miller 05:15
So Craig, what do you think about the new technologies that are, you know, in our homes like Alexa or even Amazon’s new dog robot?
Craig Taylor 05:24
Well, they’re they’re no different than these other technologies. They’re all computer based systems, and they’re going to have flaws. What worries me about Alexa, and Apple’s home product and these the robot dog is that the damage that can occur when there is a serious flaw is significant, right? It can listen in to your conversation, it can be hacked by people that want to spy on you, whether it’s the government or otherwise. And so you may never know that your conversations are being recorded.
So it’s important, there’s another tip for that is to make sure you turn on the privacy turn on the privacy of these devices so that they don’t send their their recordings to the cloud or to Amazon, Facebook to analyze and then send you advertisements, right? There’s plenty of examples where someone has a daughter that got pregnant, and because she was searching on Google Cloud for diapers or some things like that. They sold that to target that said, you know, coupons for diapers to the house, and she wasn’t prepared to tell her parents that she was pregnant, but that dad saw this and wondered why is this with my daughter’s name on it. And so the privacy was totally breached. So you need to make sure the privacy is also enabled so you’re not sharing your data unnecessarily with these vendors. So that’s true of Alexa, Google Home and some of these other technology I’m sure the new Amazon dog as well.
