Patch management - two words that are vital to cybersecurity, but that rarely generate enough attention.
Recent stats from the Verizon Data Breach report showed that many of the most exploited vulnerabilities in 2014 were nearly a decade old, and some were even more ancient than that. Additional numbers from the NTT Group 2015 Global Threat Intelligence Report revealed that 76 percent of vulnerabilities they observed on enterprise networks in 2014 were two years old or more.
Our CTO Mark Kedgley comments: “It is worth noting there are configuration-based vulnerabilities to address as well as software/patch-based vulnerabilities. The conflict between delivering ease-of-use and the need for security affects all operating system platforms, databases, and network devices.
“This leaves all systems vulnerable to an attack unless a Hardened Build Standard is applied. Both the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and NIST National Vulnerability Database websites are ideal sources of guidance to get systems hardened.”
You can read more about patch management on Security Week here