Spotlight On: Software vulnerabilities and patch management




Symantec Cyber Security Brief Podcast show

Summary: On this week’s Cyber Security Brief, we discuss a timely issue – the importance of patching software vulnerabilities and the necessity for organizations to have good patch management. We decided to cover this topic as it is something that has been much in the news recently: CVE-2020-0601, a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows CryptoAPI, that was reported to the software giant by the NSA and was described as “severe” by the security agency, has made many headlines in the last week. Vulnerabilities in software from Citrix, and in Pulse Secure VPN servers, which were first revealed in December and April 2019, respectively, were also in the news in the last week or so. The vulnerabilities in the Pulse VPN servers were patched back in April - but despite this they are suspected of having been exploited in several cyber attacks since then, demonstrating that patches are not always being applied in a timely fashion. We discuss why that might be, and a variety of other issues, in this podcast.