Only about one in five companies is “completely prepared” for the next virus attack, according to the results of a survey of 150 IT professionals who manage software updates for their companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The biggest problem when businesses are hit by a virus is user downtime.<\/p>\n
The survey, completed last month by research firm InsightExpress and commissioned by SupportSoft Inc., a developer of software for managing software updates, portrays patch management as an ongoing issue that poses a variety of risks.<\/p>\n
For example, patching still takes a week or longer at about a quarter of companies. That compares with 19% of respondents who say their IT organizations distribute patches to all computers within hours and 57% that do the job in days.<\/p>\n
When asked how well prepared their IT organizations were for a virus attack, three-quarters are only “somewhat prepared,” compared with 21.3% that are completely prepared.<\/p>\n
“It shows companies are struggling to get a handle on patching,” says Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions On Microsoft.<\/p>\n
The biggest concern among survey respondents is spyware, cited by 25%, followed by viruses and other kinds of malicious software. The most difficult part of patch management is an inability to update all systems with a single patch (24% of respondents) and the sheer number of patches that need to be distributed each month (21%).<\/p>\n
Keeping up with Microsoft’s monthly security bulletins and associated software patches has been a challenge for some IT departments. In February, Microsoft issued a dozen security bulletins that addressed 17 vulnerabilities in Windows or its other products.<\/p>\n
The negative effect most associated with viruses is end-user downtime, cited by 43% of respondents to the InsightExpress survey.<\/p>\n
Chris Grejtak, senior VP of products and marketing with SupportSoft, says the survey underscores that remote and mobile computers are particularly hard to keep updated.<\/p>\n
Microsoft’s Systems Management Server 2003 is used by some large companies to distribute updates to Microsoft products <\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.securitypipeline.com\/news\/60405613;jsessionid=SUEDHZPSUU2BWQSNDBCCKHSCJUMEKJVN<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4571,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084\/revisions\/4571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}