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The trackd blog

News, stories and insights from the team at trackd

The concept of AutoPilot was developed by our founder while patching datacenter servers.

This Is Why I Founded trackd

Today, we’re releasing something we’re calling AutoPilot (only because we couldn’t think of anything more clever). At first glance, it’s a basic upgrade to our auto-patching rules engine, offering an additional variable for IT operators

A Faster Horse

Today, those in vulnerability management often create development environments (aka sandboxes) to test whether or not new patches will cause disruptions on their networks…just like they’ve been doing for 3 decades. Which leads to only

Patch failures are often caused by deferral windows.

Why Patches Fail

The psychological source of this particular patch failure, of course, is the omnipresent fear that applying patches will result in a service disruption that will, at a minimum, make for a miserable few hours for

A comprehensive guide to patch management for MSPs

The Ultimate Guide to Patch Management for MSPs

Patch management is not just a best practice; it is an essential aspect of MSP operations. Failing to regularly patch systems and applications can leave your clients vulnerable to cyberattacks, data breaches, and system failures.

October’s (2024) Patch Tuesday Damage Report

** 72 Hours After Patch Tuesday ** 72-hours in and it’s looking like Dell devices are the “hardest” hit this month, albeit not crazily. A lot of smaller disruptions this month, so let’s dig in!

September’s (2024) Patch Tuesday Damage Report

** 2 Weeks After Patch Tuesday ** Take advantage of this month’s relatively benign updates! Server 2016’s update seems to be the problem child this month, though, but not catastrophically so, thankfully – This month’s

The concept of AutoPilot was developed by our founder while patching datacenter servers.

This Is Why I Founded trackd

Today, we’re releasing something we’re calling AutoPilot (only because we couldn’t think of anything more clever). At first glance, it’s a basic upgrade to our auto-patching rules engine, offering an additional variable for IT operators to account for when determining whether or not to designate a patch for auto-update.

August’s (2024) Patch Tuesday Damage Report

** 2 Weeks After Patch Tuesday ** Nothing too crazy after two weeks of installs. Microsoft has acknowledged this month’s updates can cause our previously reported performance issues and suggest using Known Issue Rollback to

Traditional emphasis on scanning and reporting in vulnerability management gives the community a false sense of security.

Wrestling with “Vulnerability Management”

Just as there’s no reason to make weight if you’re not going to wrestle, there’s no reason to scan for and identify vulnerabilities if you’re not going to patch them.

The Crowdstrike incident has the potential to make IT pros gun-shy about patching.

The Real Tragedy (Potentially) Caused by the Crowdstrike Outage

Twenty years ago, the risk calculation with respect to patching favored a cautious approach: patches frequently caused disruptions and threat actors were both fewer in number and their tools and communities were much less sophisticated (not to mention monetizing a successful compromise was infinitely more difficult without crypto-currency). Fast forward to today, and that calculation is inverted,

July’s (2024) Microsoft Patch Tuesday Damage Report

It’s certainly been an eventful month for IT operators… Obviously the biggest disruption to happen in the last two weeks was the Crowdstrike incident, albeit caused by themselves, not Microsoft. Regardless, if I didn’t call it out someone would Spongemock me, so it’s here. 

The use of CPE data by vulnerability scanners is responsible for many of VM's false positives.

CPE Data and False Positives in Vulnerability Management

The problem of false positives in vulnerability management can largely be attributed to the use of CPE (Common Platform Enumeration) data in the correlation process, a critical first step in vulnerability management.