Regular patch updates are especially important for companies in times of cybercrime as well as hacker attacks. Those who underestimate this offer criminal energies a perfect attack surface.
Hackers and cyber criminals work on a daily basis in order to find security vulnerabilities and abuse them for their own purposes. Detected vulnerabilities are used in order to spread malware, specifically infect companies with Trojans and the like, and steal data.
There are various ways to reduce the risk of such attacks. Besides a disaster recovery concept, a patch management process is a complementary way in order to protect yourself in the best possible way.
The word "patch" is an update for software. This creates corrections and/or closes security gaps. Such software patches are sometimes implemented without informing users or are only designated as necessary updates.
In the end of 2021, such a critical vulnerability became known in the Java library Log4j. The threat of this vulnerability was classified as highly critical by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) for several weeks. (Source)
Log4j affected and continues to affect numerous companies and especially software vendors. They reacted with patches and workarounds for their software solutions to close the vulnerability.
The current short information about Log4j is available here: Apache log4j: Vulnerability allows code execution (as of 09.06.2022).
Basically, there are four different patch types:
Especially in the software sector, continuous further development is important, and not only regards to cybercrime. New customer’s requirements must be answered and, if possible, even before the competition. In the case of updates and bug fixes, extensive testing is necessary before release to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Therefore, patch management is an important part for further development.
After the test phase, bug fixes and updates are collected in the form of new features and are released with the help of a new version of the software. Companies usually use a fixed date a so-called "patch day" or release day. On this date, patches such as bug fixes and new features are released on a monthly or weekly basis.
Time-critical security patches or hotfix/critical patches are applied to individual installations.
We being Libelle IT Group are constantly developing our software. Thus we use our releases in order to respond to new customer needs as well as bugs. With the help of test management, these are thoroughly tested and then released.
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