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I am curious what Dye’s definition is for "cyber-attack?" One this is for sure, the motivation of hackers and malware has changed dramatically over the years. The threats are new and different today. Going back in history most malware was related to someone wanting cyber fame, making a political statement or just plain mischievousness. Now with the advent of ransomware, spam mailing bots and
The best source of information covering this requirement comes from NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology. They have a set of documents that are the standards for many requirements. There is nothing specific in the NIST guidelines about the end of life for Windows XP, however, the need to provide Flaw Remediation is clear and that is what the X, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003 support requirements fall under.
 For example, NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-531 requires the SI-2, Flaw Remediation security control, which includes installing...
Play Ransomware Recovery Services Alvaka's Play Ransomware Recovery Services are designed to protect your company’s systems from Ransomware and help you recovery when necessary. Learn more Stop being a victim [...]
Cyber Insurance 101 Cyber insurance, also known as cyber risk insurance or cyber liability insurance, is a type of insurance coverage designed to protect businesses and individuals from potential losses and liabilities arising from cyber-related incidents. These incidents may [...]
On September 27, 2023, the FBI issued an alert regarding a growing trend of dual ransomware attacks, primarily targeting US businesses. The FBI emphasized that these attacks were occurring in close succession, with some victims encountering two different ransomware variants [...]
What is Generative AI? Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence capable of producing fresh content, including text, images, audio, and video. It accomplishes this by learning the patterns and structure from existing data and then using this [...]
What is Cybersecurity Consolidation? Cybersecurity consolidation refers to the process of streamlining and centralizing various cybersecurity tools, solutions, and processes within an organization. This consolidation aims to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and [...]
Royal Ransomware Recovery Services Alvaka’s Royal Ransomware Recovery Services are designed to help companies recover from ransomware attacks and protect your systems from future attacks. Learn more Stop being a victim [...]
Ransomware Restoration Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly common and devastating for businesses of all sizes. As a cyber risk insurance provider, you play a critical role in helping your clients recover from these attacks. However, the ransomware [...]
Ransomware Prevention Ransomware continues to plague businesses of all sizes and is not showing any signs of slowing down. Prolonged—or poorly managed—recovery efforts can lead to significant downtime that can have a devastating impact on the bottom [...]
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. The process typically involves making sure servers are rebooted in the right order, making sure they have completely rebooted, restarting applications in the right order, and then testing to be certain everything is working properly when users return to work in the morning.
This typically takes 30 minutes per server, depending upon your environment.
PCs are not typically smoke tested, or if so, not all of them.
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
There are many variables to consider. Some are:
You want to enter in a fully burdened labor rate for this field. What that means is that you want to take the base hourly rate, plus 25-30% for employer payroll taxes, benefits, vacation/holiday time, etc.
For example, someone making $80,000 per year will typically work 52 weeks of 40 hours, or 2080 hours. $80,000 divided by 2080 is $38.46/hour. Multiply that hourly rate by 1.3, and you get $50.00/hour. Of course, rates of pay, taxes and benefits will vary from city, state and company; but 30% is usually a good number to use. Don’t forget to account for time-and-a-half or after-hours rates of pay if patching is being done in the late evening, early morning, or weekends (in order to avoid impacting user productivity).
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.
If you are presenting to management for a budget, and using this calculator as the basis for a Return on Investment (ROI), you will need to do more homework. An ROI measures as a ratio of the cost of investment against its expected benefit. For patching, calculating benefit can be very difficult to determine. How do you measure the cost of a system breach you have not yet had? You can estimate what expenses, penalties, and losses a company might incur when a breach occurs; but there is no certainty of a breach event and what those costs actually are. There are also regulatory compliance issues and/or potential fines for not patching, but those, too, can be vague. For calculating these potential risks and costs, it is advisable to enter into a discussion with your management team.
