Why You Need to Patch Your Devices as Soon as Possible
With the latest advances in technology, developers have been able to release new content onto software really fast and often. It’s understandable that it can get annoying to keep downloading and applying these updates onto your devices however it’s for the better.
There’s upsides and downsides to these technological advances. The good sides are that you get more content and features, it gets pushed out to you faster and the updates are usually very easy to apply.
The downsides are that the larger the codebase the higher the room for errors and bugs is to appear, these bugs can easily avoid detection during testing and not every device is as easy to patch. You’ve probably already spotted what’s wrong here and how this can lead to issues.
Lets say you have a social media app. A developer ends up breaking something thus causing a bug however it is not found and makes its way onto your device. Hackers are always on the lookout for new vulnerabilities and once they find one, they will try to exploit as many devices as they can. Since you’ve downloaded the new update with the bug, you are now vulnerable to these exploits. These bugs can often stay secret for a long time before the developers find them or they’re found as an exploit in the wild.
The way to get around this is to either check if there are any new updates daily or allow your device to perform automatic updates. Developers release patches either on Patch Tuesday (first Tuesday of each month) or every once in a while whenever it’s ready. Leaving this process to do itself means you don’t have to waste time accepting each update and they can be downloaded as soon as possible.
That’s about it really. Updating can be a boring and annoying experience but it can save your devices. Back in 2017, there was a major cybersecurity incident when a hacking group known as Shadow Brokers managed to acquire a dangerous NSA tool that exploited a Windows SMB bug. This then allowed them to spread the Wannacry worm and infect thousands of NHS computers with ransomware. A patch was released just 2 months before this and had they updated their systems, there wouldn’t have been such a disruption caused.
