Give your systems the flu-shot. Inoculate them with patching.
Every year, shortly after our kids return to school, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) launches their annual Flu vaccination. Does it work? — I’m a firm believer. Each year, my family lines up to take a shot and innoculate ourselves from the influenza variants the CDC deems critical.
This evening, that got me thinking as I was reading the lead story on CNN which highlighted that email spam is down but viruses are up. After recently talking to some experts at Sunbelt, I can assure you that is true. Back in 2004, the major Anti-Virus (AV) players had just north of 3,000,000 anti-virus test definitions on the market. That number grew to 5,000,000 by mid-2007. That’s a big increase, but as you can guess the story gets more interesting. By the end of 2009, that number had mushroomed to a staggering 35,000,000 test definitions. In the span of two and a half years, the test definitions jumped seven-fold.
It’s a new day where we all are vulnerable to viruses and over the past year, we’re seen viruses take on a whole new severity in which we see unequivocal evidence that they are growing in their sophistication as well as damage. What typically sought to cause malicious damage to a single machine is now designed to exploit networks and in some cases even attack manufacturing equipment. To be honest, it’s time for all of us to understand the severity of computer viruses and their scope.
In the years to come, the bad news is that it has to get worse before it gets better. Thus far, we’ve watched AV definitions continue their exponential growth trend this year and we have no doubt they will push our safety experts across the entire IT industry into a frenzy trying to keep up. But back to my original point for this email… with the changing times, using just AV isn’t enough.
The logical complement for Anti-Virus is innoculating your environment. How do you do this? — It’s actually really simple: viruses exploit security vulnerabilities as a result, a good patching strategy can ensure you don’t have holes for these nasty viruses to exploit. Think about that as you get your flu-shots this year.
