Keep all your software updated and current
I know that I keep going and going on that. When I talk to customers and mainly to providers of the critical infrastructure about security, one of the key things to me is to keep the software updated. It is about patching and it is about staying on the latest version of your software. To me, today Windows XP is a huge risk out there. It was an outstanding operating system when it was launched but it is definitely outdated if you think about how the threat landscape looked like only 5-10 years ago. I am aware of the fact that not all systems can be upgraded because of compatibility issues, a vendor might not even exist anymore. Then these systems need definitely be shielded in different ways to keep them as far off the network as possible.
The reason for this post is, that I still see a lot of customers who developed a really good practice for handling Microsoft updates but not for the rest. I just read these two articles this morning:
So, make sure you cover all your software including third-party apps and open source.
Roger