The number of reported security vulnerabilities in 2013 continued to increase compared to 2012. Vulnerabilities are on the rise constantly increasing since 2011. The high severity vulnerabilities increased by 16 percent from 2012.
Are You Ready for 2014? GFI LanGuard® 2014 Is!
We’re very happy to announce GFI LanGuard 2014 has been launched today! In this Q&A interview, Cristian Florian, Product Manager for GFI LanGuard, talks about what’s new in this release.
Q: How is GFI LanGuard adapting to the changes that happen so fast in the IT infrastructure landscape nowadays?
Cristian Florian, Product Manager for GFI LanGuard
IT environments now include so many different devices, operating systems and applications that network administrators may not even be aware of all of them. The rise in BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) in business environments has added to the burden system administrators have to carry every day, in turn forcing them to stay on top of their network environment, strengthen security, while also monitoring an ever-changing network infrastructure.
Hackers Find the Internet a Target-Rich Environment Thanks to Poor Patch Management
You would think that with things like automatic updates, applications
that can automatically patch themselves, and the constant media attention towards security, hackers would be a dying breed, bereft of targets which they can exploit. Unfortunately, poor patch management practices across the board means that the ever-growing number of connected devices are providing hackers with and endless supply of fresh victims.
The Problem with Patching Is – Not Patching!
Patching is not something that the IT department really enjoys doing. It is complicated and ongoing. It takes forever and it doesn’t add any actual business value.
Meanwhile you have myriad systems to patch, and endless patches to test and then install. Then you have to do it all over again. And again. And again.
No wonder a recent study by the UK-based Federation of Small Business shows that little more than a third (36%) of small shops patch regularly. Then these shops wonder why they got compromised, or blame their software vendors, especially Microsoft® – a common security punching bag!
Patching, well, patching properly, solves the majority of security problems. In fact 90% of successful exploits are against unpatched systems.
Even environments that should presumably be highly secure too often fail to patch. Last year an audit at the U.S. Department of Energy found that some 60% of their desktops lacked important patches.
Patch management: Fixing vulnerabilities before they are exploited
Introduction
Managing and administering software updates remains one of the most challenging and resource-intensive tasks an IT Department undertakes on a daily basis.
While software updates serve many important roles, be it delivering feature improvements or fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities, they bring with them a number of potential challenges for the IT Department in terms of ensuring systems are up-to-date, that new problems are not introduced by patches designed to fix things, and updates do not create compatibility or instability issues. All this needs to be done while ensuring that updates are pushed to PCs as quickly as possible to prevent vulnerabilities being exploited. The constantly evolving software landscape makes patch management an important consideration for all IT decision makers,regardless of organization size.