“Hackers don’t wait for your patch window – why should you?”.

Many organizations face an impending risk of a data breach due to patch delays. They take time, often longer than desired, to remediate vulnerabilities found in applications. The delay, or patch gap, creates an opportunity for cybercriminals to strike. Even if fleeting, the short window is more than enough for bad actors to perform acts that cause massive losses. Statistics show that 25% of CVEs were exploited within the same days and 75% within 19 days. If you’re a CIO, CISO, or leading efforts in securing your organization, you need to expedite patching. Or risk the consequences.

Why should you take unpatched vulnerabilities seriously?

Unpatched systems create opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit known security flaws and zero-day vulnerabilities. According to a study, 20% of data breach incidents originated from unpatched vulnerabilities. These often lead to more damaging secondary attacks, such as ransomware, DDoS, and data breaches. To further aggravate the situation, many of these vulnerabilities are found in edge devices. Patching vulnerabilities on these devices has been traditionally slow. Half of the vulnerable devices were patched in 32 days. The others took longer, which puts your organization at risk.

How do patch delays affect organizations?

Organizations might not immediately feel the fallouts from delaying patching. However, exploits stemming from patch gaps can result in catastrophic losses. According to IBM, global companies lose an average of $4 million for a single data breach, an incident often attributed to unpatched vulnerabilities. The risks aren’t theoretical. Over the years, organizations overlooking patching have paid dearly in financial, operational, and reputational losses. For example, Equifax suffered a data breach that exposed the personal data of 147 millions of users. Investigators found that the root cause was a known vulnerability in the client access portal, which hackers exploit. Yet, they’re not the only victim. A more recent incident involves MoveIT, a provider of file-sharing services. Like Equifax, criminals exploited a known vulnerability in MoveIT’s file transfer software. The incident’s aftermath affects both the company and other organizations using its service.

Why do businesses struggle with timely patching?

Stakeholders often realize how important patching is. However, they face difficulties to implement it for several reasons.

• Technical complexity. Deploying patches across layers of network can be challenging. This creates uneven blindsposts that attackers target.
• Resource constraints. Small and medium businesses might have limited budget to install sophisticated patching solution.
• Patching fatigue. Security teams using conventional patching software are constrained to manual patching, which complicates the effort.
• Business continuity. Some business leaders are concerned that applying untested patches might cause systems breakdown.

How VulnDetect and PatchPro overcome patch delays

VulnDetect and PatchPro are automatic patch management solutions that reduced patching time from weeks to hours. Unlike conventional patching tools, our solution runs silently from the background, which prevents disruption to your workflow. More importantly you can detect vulnerabilities on all connected devices and remediate before they can be exploited. Don’t fall victim to unpatched vulnerabilites.

Contact us to schedule a demo now.