InSecurity Podcast: Jay Prassl On Why You Should Patch Your $#!%!

Are all_­ of your apps and OS’s up to date? Are you sure? How can you tell? And why patch? Allow Cylance's Matt Stephenson to elaborate:

"An American Dental Association study in 2008 found that if you don’t brush your teeth you COULD DIE. The ADA recommends brushing your teeth twice a day for four minutes each time.

What the heck does that have to do with anything? Stick around....

According to Ponemon, nearly half of all companies they surveyed had suffered a breach. 57% of those companies were breached due to an unpatched vulnerability. A third of those companies knew they were vulnerable before the breach. They also found out that the average company spends 321 labor hours a week managing their vulnerability response process.

How’s that compare to spending four minutes, twice a day brushing your teeth? Starting to see the connection there?

In 2017, the WannaCry ransomware outbreak affected over 200,000 machines in 150 countries over a single weekend. The ransomware was developed using NSA tools built to exploit Windows vulnerabilities. What if I told you that Microsoft had released a patch for this vulnerability over a month before WannaCry hit?

Speaking of Microsoft, our good friends at TripWire tell us that in 201, Microsoft alone issued 2804 patches. That’s roughly 56 patches every Tuesday - and that’s just for Windows OS & applications. Noodle on those numbers a bit.

What if you had a way to keep your network clean and up to date by doing something as simple and boring as keeping your Operating Systems and applications up to date? In this week’s episode of the InSecurity Podcast, Matt Stephenson speaks with Automox CEO Jay Prassl about the role that patching plays in every business’s cybersecurity hygiene.

Jay founded Automox based on one simple maxim: Patch Your $#!%. Take a walk with him and see what you think…"

Read the full blog post by Cylance here!