The Week Ahead: Big Patch Cycle, Familiar Threats, and One Check Worth Doing
Every Monday we look forward rather than back. This week the calendar has one obvious landmark: the monthly patch cycle, expected on Tuesday the fifteenth.
If you have never paid attention to patch day, here is the short version. Once a month, the big software makers release fixes for security holes all at once. This month's batch from Microsoft is unusually large, running to close to a thousand fixes. That sounds dramatic, but the practical effect at home is simple. Your laptop, tablet and phone want an update, and the fastest thing you can do is let it happen.
A lot of people skip updates because they assume they are for offices with IT staff. They are not. Rushed or delayed updates are one of the most common gaps behind the fraud and data theft we cover on this show.
Our monitoring team at DarkWatch logged just under half a million new captures, nearly nine and a half thousand entities, about sixteen hundred alerts, and five active targets this week. That sounds alarming in a headline, but look at who it is aimed at. Organisations with exposed systems. Most listeners are not the owner of those systems. The pattern behind the alerts, though, is useful to everyone: out of date software, remote access tools left open, and logins with no second check.
Two things follow from that. First, take the updates. Pick an evening this week, plug your devices in, and let them run. Second, and more valuable, switch on two step verification for your main email account. If your email is protected with a second check, a large share of what circulates online never reaches you at all.
One more note for the week ahead. Whenever patches are in the news, fraudsters use the story. We expect messages claiming you must click a link to finish an update. Your device updates itself. No legitimate patch arrives by email asking for your details.
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