The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) stated in a blog, “patching remains the single most important thing you can do to secure your technology and is why applying patches is often described as ‘doing the basics.”
They go on to explain that it’s not easy to do in practice. This is due to factors such as the time it takes, the cost, maintenance of accurate asset inventories, the risk of a patch breaking something, failed rollouts, or the inability to patch all equipment. When patching is hard, the NCSC recommends six defense-in-depth tactics to help prevent attacks, detect and respond:
- Reduce ways to exploit attacks through architecture and configuration.
- Manage your assets well (know what you have and what it’s doing, and have ways of finding out when something changes)
- Manage your operational risks
- Back up your business-critical data
- Have a security monitoring capability, to help with problem detection and cleanup
- Create and practice incident response/business continuity plans
Contact NTS if you need help with any, or all, of the above.
We do IT very well, every day!
Mark Brandon mbrandon@thinkNTS.com
Original article found here: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/the-problems-with-patching
