Simple Tips for Network Sanity: Patch Tuesday, Exploit Wednesday and Uninstall Thursday
Today I’d like to talk a little bit about our partnership with Microsoft and patch management. In a previous life I was a network/sysadmin. A brief description of that role was “If it has a blinking light on it, I am responsible for it,” which meant on most days I felt like I was living in the middle of a sci-fi movie, surrounded by demanding technology.
When you live in a hair-on-fire environment like that, keeping up with Microsoft patches can be painful. You can set them to automatically download and install and you should be good, that is unless the patch breaks something or even worse – it breaks everything.
When you have business-critical applications that are legacy or just plain old, patching can break them. If that app in question is the bread and butter of the business, patching can bring down the entire company. On the other hand, not patching for known vulnerabilities can be just as bad, if not worse.
There is an old saying: Patch Tuesday, Exploit Wednesday, and Uninstall Thursday. Microsoft normally releases patches on the second Tuesday of the month, so Exploit Wednesday is when the cyber criminals have analyzed the details from Tuesday and deliver code to exploit the systems that haven’t been updated. Uninstall Thursday is the day you finally figure out that it was the Tuesday patch that broke your mission-critical system and you need to uninstall it to get things back to normal.
To say it is a Catch-22 would be an understatement. How do you stop the insanity? We, SonicWall, have partnered with Microsoft in a program call MAPP. Microsoft gives us advance knowledge of what will be patched prior to Tuesday so that we have signatures in place to protect our customers who just can’t patch on Tuesday.
Should you patch on Tuesday? Yes, you should absolutely patch on Tuesday or any other day Microsoft releases a patch. But if there are times you just can’t, we can help protect you until you can. Assisting with patches is one of the many little things we have been doing quietly in the background for years that most people are unaware of. Now you know we have you covered when you are stuck in this Catch-22. The biggest take away is that you should patch. I can’t stress that enough: patch, patch, patch! But if you can’t, know that we are already behind the scenes, helping to keep your network safe.
Visit SonicWall GRID Threat Network for MAPP bulletins.
For the Security Advisories for MAPP, you can click here.
