Patch, Patch, Patch – You need to stay up-to-date

UTS Support Posted on January 16, 2018 Posted in Best Practice, Weekly Tip

This week’s topic is Patch, Patch, Patch – You need to stay up-to-date

The Tip

There are going to be a lot of updates released in the weeks to come for your phone, your tablet, your computers… it is more important than ever to keep your devices fully up to date.

The Detail

If you follow much news at all, you’ve likely heard a lot about the Meltdown and Spectre security threats, that became public news around the holiday break. In a nutshell, security vulnerabilities at the base chip level, effecting Intel, AMD, ARM, and possibly other processors, have been discovered. This impacts pretty much every device with a computer in existence. Industry insiders learned of this vulnerability under nondisclosure agreements several months ago and immediately began developing engineering mitigations and updating cloud infrastructures.

In the days ahead, there will be a lot of patches released by all vendors to help protect against these very real concerns. Some have already been released, and likely applied. Many servers and cloud services have been updated. Apple and Microsoft have both released updates in that last few days to deal with this. More will follow. Some older devices may be left behind, and if you’re hanging on to that ancient iPhone or desktop running Windows XP, it may be time to retire them. Older systems that are patched can expect noticeable slowdowns in performance. Newer systems (2016+) running modern operating systems (Windows 10 or Apple High Sierra) should see considerably less of a performance impact.

If you have questions or concerns about applying an update, please contact UTS Support.

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