Essential 8 Patch Management Keeps Your Digital World Secure
Why is patch management important?
Cybersecurity has emerged as a significant concern for businesses across Australia. With the increasing sophistication of cyber threats, no organization, whether a large corporation or a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME), is immune.
The Essential 8 cybersecurity strategy offers a practical guide to businesses for mitigating cyber risks.
However, Australian SMEs often underestimate the relevance of Essential 8, partly due to the lack of a compliance standard. There is a pressing need to raise awareness about the importance of adhering to these Essential 8 strategies to protect businesses against potential cyber-attacks.
The 8 elements of Essential 8 are:
Application Control/Whitelisting - to control the execution of unauthorised software
Configure Macros - to block untrusted macros
Patch Application - to remediate known security vulnerabilities
Application Hardening - to protect against vulnerable functionality
Restrict Admin Permissions -/to limit powerful access to systems.
Patch Operating Systems - to remediate known security vulnerabilities.
Multi-Factor Authentication - to protect against risk activities.
Daily Backups - to maintain the availability of critical data
Patch Management is only one of the Essential 8 requirements and also one of the most important. Keeping up to date with current release patches for software and hardware will leave your device vulnerable to all sorts of exploits which can include remote access to your device, stolen credentials, and compromised private information. In this article, we explain the importance of Patch Management and how it can make your journey through the cyber world a safer place.
There are four key reasons to follow up with patch management, these are:
Security features - Patches include new and updated security for your devices and programs/applications. This can include more secure options for a user and patches to combat new malicious files/programs.
System uptime - Patch updates can also increase the efficiency and runtime of a program as well as eliminate bugs and vulnerabilities that may be present within the application.
Compliance - It is a requirement to keep up-to-date with new updates as guided through Essential 8 and all other compliance and standards. Failure to apply security updates can lead to data breaches and non-compliance for businesses.
Feature improvements - Patches can also include new and improved features for a program or device to ease workflow even further.
The Challenges of managing ‘the patch’.
Having to monitor and deploy new and updated patches for multiple programs can be overwhelming, as not only is an individual keeping an eye out for the latest patches and deploying them, but they also have to test if the patch has downloaded and works correctly. Some programs can monitor the releases of new patches available as well as deploying them but will still need to be monitored by an IT team as bugs or glitches can occur, creating a faulty patch installation.
How do you keep up with Patch Rollouts?
Having a plan and a policy to abide by is simply how to keep up with patch rollouts and even failed deploys. Below is a quick and simple reference list - Researching, organising, and completing the list is the solution to patch management and ZERO vulnerabilities on YOUR system:
Assignment of roles and points of contact
Detecting and scheduling
Prioritisation
Testing
Patch deployment
Tracking, monitoring, and reporting
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This is Part of our Cyber Security awareness educational campaign. Through this training, you will learn awareness and key principles, and best practices to protect yourself, your organisation, and the public from cyber attackers. You will also be equipped with the knowledge to identify potential threats and take action before any damage can occur.