Restarting – Welcome to our new blog
Our blog is now the responsibility of our excellent support team, so they can share their IT support advice and stories with you. However, they are busy this week moving a large office and launching a website for a company, both on very short notice (sometimes clients do that to us), as well as their regular support duties, so they have asked me to restart our blog.
OK let’s be honest here
When I got the call this morning I was in the middle of preparing today’s news for Smart Thinking Solutions and outlining tomorrow’s article for CyberAwake (our online cyber awareness training site) and to have to think of another topic to write about for the relaunch of our blog was going to be a challenge. Then the box popped up on my laptop screen announcing that it was going to restart for important updates, and offered me an option to do it or delay and I got an idea for an article and a perfect segue – restarting.
Patches and Updates
Do you drink coffee? No.
Do you drink tea? No.
Do you drink anything?
The point I am trying to make here is although I hear moans and groans from both clients and members of our staff here in the office, about having to stop work to reboot their computers, we all already pause work for a variety of reasons, so why not combine them? My latest reason to get up and pause working is my new Apple Watch, reminding me that it is good for my health to get up every hour and walk around.
Software is complicated and it does not matter how big the company is and how extensive their pre-release testing, there will always be a mistake somewhere that a threat actor will find and exploit. The race is for the vendor to find (or be notified of by a friendly security researcher – ethical hacker) and fix the flaw before the hackers take advantage of it. Your part of that ongoing protection plan is that when the vendors make the updates available to you, you need to restart your machine.
Then there is Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday – read about that, here.
That’s it
Quick and to the point – restarting your machine is a good thing and you have to do it – the threat actors prepare their phishing emails and social engineering attacks looking for those of you who do not bother because you are too busy!
Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles
References
Schneier, B. (2018). Click here to kill everybody: Security and survival in a hyper-connected world. WW Norton & Company.
Further Reading
Sometimes a simple email may work for the bad guys
How Microsoft Patch Tuesday can help your cyber security planning
