30DISC – Day 1 – Installing Operating System and Application Updates

Day One – here we go!

Today’s challenge – Installing Operating System and Application Updates – Direct Link to Guide Page

For most people this should hopefully be an easy one to check off – if you’re running a reasonably new Windows or Mac, this should be set by default, but let’s go through it. Today’s task is to apply any software updates to your operating system and make sure it receives and applies them automatically in the future. This is one of the most important ways to keep yourself digitally safe. Very rarely does a successful hack occur against a system that is running up-to-date software: they almost always depend on old vulnerabilities that have already been fixed by the software maker.

Geoffrey: My machine was already setup to automatically receive updates, however for some reason the most recent software update hadn’t applied properly, so I had to manually apply it and restart the computer. All good, that was easy!

Juan: He has a brand-new Lenovo Yoga 370 running Windows 10. It was already setup to receive updates and apply them automatically, so he passed this challenge with flying colours.

Diana: She is running a brand-new Apple Macbook Pro.  The reason she has a brand new Macbook Pro is that the up to the week before our challenge started, she was running her business off a 5 year old Dell Latitude D430 laptop using Windows XP. Upon hearing this I told her that there was no way she could complete the challenge with that particular machine because Windows XP is no longer receiving security updates from Microsoft, and is completely compromised. So now she has a shiny new Macbook Pro and is vastly more secure just to start with. Her system was already up-to-date and has automatic installation of updates turned on, so she also passed with flying colours.

Priscilla: She has an older Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop running Windows 7. It was provided by his work and was, when issued to him, set up to automatically update. At some point this feature was turned off by someone, and as such, it hadn’t received an update for about 9 months. This is obviously bad, so that was corrected and it then took about two hours and multiple restarts of the laptop to get up to date. But Priscilla is now good to go.

A straightforward day for 3 of us, not so for one. See you tomorrow!

Previous Days Here:
Day 0 – Introduction to the Team