The importance of keeping up to date with patches

September 15, 2017
Kevin Lam

Here’s a story about what caused hackers to be able to compromise the Equifax hack which eventually led to 143 million accounts to be accessed:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/equifax-confirms-apache-struts-flaw-it-failed-to-patch-was-to-blame-for-data-breach

The cause was a series of patches that were available since March that slipped through the update process. There’s no point in throwing pies at Equifax, what’s done is done. What you can learn though is as soon as patches are available, apply them!

Common pushback I get from this is usually “what happens if we apply the patch and takes down our systems?”. It all comes down to what risks your company is willing to tolerate? Would you rather suffer a few hours of downtime, or have your systems compromised by hackers?

–Kevin