Our operating systems can contain numerous vulnerabilities. In this video, you’ll learn how attackers use these vulnerabilities and how to protect your systems from unwanted intrusion.
One of the things you’ll constantly hear security professionals discuss is the need to keep operating systems patched to the latest versions. That’s because operating systems are foundational computing platforms, and everybody is running an operating system. From the perspective of an attacker, this makes it a very attractive place to start looking for vulnerabilities. And by keeping your operating system up to date, you can close any of these known vulnerabilities.
One of the challenges associated with these operating systems is that they are remarkably complex. Windows 11 is estimated to have tens of millions of lines of code. And the more code you have in an operating system, the more opportunity for security vulnerabilities to appear. So if you think about it, the operating system that you’re using right now contains many different security vulnerabilities, but we just don’t know what those vulnerabilities are yet.
Researchers and attackers will find these vulnerabilities. They’ll be reported to the manufacturer of the software. They’ll create a patch and an update, and we’ll install that patch on our systems. In the case of Microsoft Windows, we receive updates of that operating system every month, specifically on what we call Patch Tuesday. This is the second Tuesday of each month. Microsoft will release entire sets of patches on that single day of the month. And then security professionals will begin testing and deploying those patches to their systems.
Let’s look at what a normal Patch Tuesday might look like. We’ll look at the Tuesday of May 9, 2023. And in that update, Microsoft released almost 50 separate security patches for Microsoft Windows operating systems and other applications. This single set of patches for May resolves a number of different security vulnerabilities. This pack includes eight Elevation of Privilege Vulnerabilities, four Security Feature Bypass Vulnerabilities, 12 Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities, and so on.
Although this seems like a large number of vulnerabilities, and it is a large number of vulnerabilities, the previous Patch Tuesday, in April of 2023, had almost 100 different vulnerabilities that were patched. If you’d like to see the latest set of patches available for your Windows operating system, you can visit the Microsoft Security Response Center at MSRC.microsoft.com.
There are a number of best practices you may want to put in place when it comes to operating system updates. The first is that you should always plan on updating. When that monthly update occurs or an on-demand update occurs at some other time, you need to be sure to patch that version of software as quickly as possible. Once a previously unknown vulnerability is suddenly announced to the world, the attackers will start looking for ways to reverse engineer that particular vulnerability so they can use it against other operating systems.
If you get your system patched before they’re able to create attack code, then your system will be safe from any subsequent attacks. If you’re updating a system at home, you may just want to make sure you have a backup, and you can perform the patch. But in very large and complex environments containing hundreds or thousands of devices, you may want to perform a test before deploying this patch into a production environment. This ensures that the patch that you’re going to deploy doesn’t in some way break something else with the operating system.
Sometimes, these patches can be automatically installed behind the scenes and no other work is required. But there are some patches, especially those that are built into the core parts of the operating system, that may require you to reboot the system to be fully patched. In that particular case, you want to make sure that you’ve saved all your data, and then you can reboot the system. And of course, even with all of the precautions and testing that you put in place, you may still find that there are problems that occur after this patch has been put into production.
That’s why it’s so important to have a backup. So if you need to go back to the configuration prior to the patch installation, you can easily do that using your known good backup.