More on Zero Days?

In last week’s #WeekendWisdom number 96, I explained what a zero day was. The reason I brought up this topic in the first place was because, as at that date, 2021 had already become a year where there was a record number of zero days being detected.

How is it a record number of zero days?

The number that was reported then was like 66 zero days:

• 20 were associated with Microsoft products
• 15 zero days were associated with Apple products, which people think Apple is the most secure platform … maybe not
• Google had 11 zero days

So previous years there might have been 40 or 50 zero days detected in the whole year. But here we are still in September and we’ve already blown through those records.

Even in just the last week since I recorded the last #WeekendWisdom, there have been four more zero days detected. Three of them associated with Apple products and one with Google Chrome.

So this really is turning out to be a year of the zero days. They really are happening a lot.

How do you protect yourself

So please folks be sure that you put in place good robust patching process to make sure you keep all your software up to date as early as possible. Also do things like keep your backups, do good backups, test the backups to make sure that you can recover from those backups and also make sure you train your staff. But keep your software patched.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

The post #WeekendWisdom 097 Record Number of Zero Days appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..

This sounds familiar

Waaaay back in the early days of the #WeekendWisdom series, back at number 3, I talked about updates. I’ll have a link to that video somewhere on the social media post associated with this video.

The events of the last week has brought it back to me that this really is an important topic that we all need to be aware of.

What happened this last week?

Apple, earlier this week, released updates to its iPhones and Mac computers and watches that plugged a vulnerability which was being exploited by a surveillance software maker which literally all they had to do if they wanted to take control of somebody’s iPhone we’ll say, all they need to do is send a message to that phone and just when the phone receives the message, they now have control of it. The user of the phone did not have to do anything. So that’s pretty scary.

Also there was the vulnerability that I talked about in last week’s #WeekendWisdom. Microsoft have issued updates for that this week. So again, it’s really critical that if you have updates waiting on your Windows computer to apply them.

This is the reason why updates are important

You see the problem here is that when the likes of Apple or Microsoft issue updates, criminals go and take those updates, they look at them and they find out what exactly has been fixed in Windows or in the iPhones or whatever. Then they can figure out how they can exploit that, that vulnerability that was there that was fixed. If people don’t do the updates, the criminals can now exploit them, for those people who don’t, because there are quite a lot of people who don’t apply updates.

But it’s really important that you do.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

The post #WeekendWisdom 095 Why Updates are Important appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..