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! sales@mtsolutions.net or call 508.324.9475