Cybersecurity Blog

Restart your machine and save your data – 07/08/21

 

With the latest zero day threat PrintNightmare, putting printing on pause across the globe; it has become more important than ever to to keep your devices updated. While there is no update yet available to patch this vulnerability, it is a good idea to make sure your computer is ready when it is released.

The best way to do that is to ensure automatic updates on your Windows machine is enabled.  MRU devices are automatically updated when you connect to the network so you don’t have to worry about them. This is a system setting controlled by ITS and it can’t be changed.  However, you can mess with automatic updates on your home machine. You can pause them on a Windows 10 machine and turn them off all together on a Windows 8 machine. It is strongly recommended that if you have paused the updates or tuned them off , you enable them again.  This ensures that as soon as  the patch for PrintNightmare is available, it will be downloaded.

If you have a Windows 7 or older machine, the automatic updates feature is not an option, you will have to check for and download the update manually. For the most part, operating systems of this age don’t receive updates anymore and are vulnerable to attack. Which is why it is a good idea to upgrade to a newer one. The exception is when a really, really nasty vulnerability comes along. PrintNightmare falls into this category. Even Windows XP will receive a patch for this one.  However, you Windows 98 and 95 holdouts are out of luck.

To complete the installation process, you have to restart your machine. This is true for MRU devices as well as your home machine. Depending on how your version of Windows is set up, you may or may not be notified that a restart is required. So it is a good idea to restart your machine daily. Daily restarts ensure that you both have the latest security patch downloaded and it has been installed as well. Also, it takes less time to restart a machine that has only one update to install versus one that has five. In just a few minutes you can save hours of heartache. Restart your machine and save your data.

 

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