What Are Patches? The Complete Guide to Software Patching

[Music] hi and welcome to this week's whiteboard Wednesday my name is Justin Buchanan

senior solutions manager for vulnerability management and offensive security solutions here at rapid7 today

we're going to talk about patching what are patches patches are fixes for errors that perhaps we've made and we need to

correct modern software is extremely complex and very difficult to make and as a result mistakes do happen and when

those mistakes happen we have to go back afterwards and apply a fix this is commonly referred to as a patch before

we dig in a little bit more let's understand where patches came from back in the day when we used to program

computers we would program them with punch cards we would actually use paper punch holes in it and feed those into

the machines the machines would read those various holes as instructions when we made mistakes in our instructions we

would take back the original punch card and apply a patch to the ownerís hole so that maybe actually like a piece of tape

over that hole so that it was no longer there and we'd feed those instructions back in today it's a little bit

different but it's still the same concept we're probably familiar with it when we

see the windows update box pop up on our machine that means that for some reason the software that Microsoft has provided

to us needs to be retro actively updated in some way perhaps there was an error in the code that was released or some

other kind of issue when that happens we install the updates and as always make sure you install your updates right away

every time in terms of who makes patches we mentioned one already we're familiar with Microsoft as an operating system

vendor operating systems have a really important job of managing all of the components of our computer systems for

us a lot of opportunities there for us to need to go back and maybe fix some things that we set up a certain way in

the past so they'll release patches to fix any kind of issues there we also have application vendors when we think

of this we think of some tools we use at work like slack or zoom or Microsoft Word these applications critical to our

success and also critical that we always have them patched up the best way and a

hundred percent ready for work and then we have network equipment vendors these ones are a little bit trickier when we

think about our home environment or our office environment we often have devices that are connected

but less successful to us things that come to mind is routers switches and things like Internet of Things video

cameras these also run software and that software can sometimes have issues with it and they also need to be patched and

that process might take a little bit more work but it's also just as important when we think about patches

holistically when we only have a few things to manage like just the updates on our individual laptop or just the

updates on our one router at home we can probably handle it ourselves but when we think about our modern environment at

our companies now we need some help we have quite a few different assets to take care of and a lot of diversity in

terms of the systems that we need to work with so manuals not going to work in our corporate environments and that's

where we can turn for help to tools like IBM bigfix which can help us understand what patches are available and help us

do the work of installing them Microsoft SCCM which is going to help us with our Microsoft assets our Windows servers our

Windows laptops help us make sure that the patches for those devices are installed and in our our modern dynamic

environments like cloud environments we can use our infrastructure orchestration tools like ansible puppet and chef to

help us make sure that when we're going through the process of building these assets for the first time we're

installing the operating system and then also layering on all the appropriate patches to keep those systems safe and

secure patching is the most important part of a vulnerability management program in vulnerability management when

we have identified a vulnerability we can really do one of three things we can either accept that risk for our business

we can implement compensating controls so we can do something else to make the vulnerability of that machine mitigated

or finally and most commonly we can remediate we can actually install the patch if available

to fix the issue that is causing the vulnerability on that machine if you'd like to learn more about how you can

understand all of the vulnerabilities in your environment all of the patches that are available to help correct those

issues in your environment and orchestrate the process of getting that work done of patching up those holes

head on over to rapid7 comm slash try slash inside VM that's it for this week's whiteboard Wednesday I hope that

it had you in stitches