March 26, 2024

Good morning, everyone!

This week’s critical vulnerabilities: Apple has issued an "update now" notice, important security fixes in iOS 17.4.1 Both Chrome and Firefox released critical fixes this past week (remember, you have to close Chrome and restart manually for automatic updates to take effect) FortiNet has released yet another critical fix for a vulnerability under active exploit Did your "automatic" updates get installed? Patch All the Things!

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the recent AT&T outage¹ which was caused by human error during an overnight system update.

This week, we learned that McDonald's experienced a global outage² due to "a third-party service provider's configuration change."

What lessons can be learned from these two experiences?

First, be cautious about making system changes. Make sure you have recent, clean, complete backups. (I do this even for my mobile devices, before running an update, I manually back them up to a computer.) Test changes on a small sample first, whenever possible.

Second, have a fall-back plan! When AT&T had no service, did you have any means of contacting family, friends, employees, or anyone at all? McDonald's lost its point-of-sale systems: "Employees also shared on social media that they could not take orders, open cash registers, or process payments because POS systems were down." Do you have a secondary means of continuing critical functions when your primary system is down?

Plan ahead and stay cyber safe this week!

Glenda R. Snodgrass
grs@theneteffect.com
(251) 433-0196 x107
https://www.theneteffect.com
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