Myth #5: It’s too risky to patch

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told by a client that it’s too risky to patch. The justifications are varied, but they usually fall into one of these general categories: (a) we can’t afford any downtime; (b) it’s a legacy system; (c) patches have been known to cause problems; or (d) our systems aren’t certified if we patch.

Let’s look at each of them in more detail.

“We can’t afford any downtime” is code for the implementation doesn’t have any redundancy or resilience, combined with a lack of understanding of whatever business process it is supporting. There is no such thing as 100% uptime, as some of the natural disasters in the last year have proved. And if there is a real business requirement for something close to 100% availability, then building a system without appropriate redundancy is an epic fail. This has nothing to do with patching.

“It’s a legacy system” is an excuse used by businesses that have poor strategic planning. A system which no longer has patches available, also no longer has support available. If a business is running a critical system with unsupported components I hope the IT manager is wearing their peril sensitive sunglasses! That way when they have a critical failure it will be without all the fear and worry that normally precedes one. This also has nothing to do with patching.

“Patches have been known to cause problems” is an example of the logical fallacy called the excluded middle. Just because a bad event has ever happened, doesn’t mean that the opposite is always true. By using this same logic, we should never get in a car as car crashes have caused deaths. It is true that patches sometimes do caused problems, but this isn’t a reason not to patch. While this is at least related to patching, it’s actually more about having a poor testing process, insufficient change management, and lack of understanding of risk management.

“Our systems aren’t certified if we patch” is code for letting the vendor set the security posture rather than the business. I mentioned this before in Myth #2 as a problem with outsourcing security, and it’s equally true here. This really doesn’t have anything to do with patching either.

In reality the certain loss from not patching is far higher than the theoretical loss from patching. In the Defence Signals Directorate top 35 mitigations against targeted cyber-attacks, patching applications is #2 and patching operating systems is #3. I really think that DSD has a much better understanding of the risk than most IT managers.

Patching is a foundation for good security as it eliminates the root cause of most compromises. Better patch management leads to lower accepted risk, and this is something that all executives want.

Any system too risky to patch is too risky to run, and that is why this myth is completely busted.

Phil Kernick Chief Technology Officer
@philkernick www.cqr.com