How To Shore Up Your Desktop

One of the most inexpensive ways to safeguard your systems is to keep your patching efforts up to date. Most organizations understand the urgency of deploying critical patches to their operating systems and infrastructure, but as the cross-hairs start to move away from exploiting OS holes towards exploiting application holes, our efforts must move with them.

Look back at the past 12 months of advisories, and you'll find exploitation methods against Web browsers, e-mail clients, utilities, MP3 players and components, including the Adobe Acrobat viewer. Even the antivirus engines run the risk of coming under siege: Recent advisories detail vulnerabilities in antivirus engines from F-Secure, Symantec and Trend Micro. One would hope that the quality-assurance process around security products would be a bit tighter to avoid such problems, but the need for patching your security products against holes just reinforces the point. Smart organizations will ensure their application-inventory systems are robust and current, and take steps to have the processes and technology in place to deploy updates whenever necessary.