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The Evolving Role of Linux
Administration and DevOps
for Patching Systems
Linux critical patches are a regular part of daily operations for sysadmins supporting all enterprise applications. Sysadmins and DevOps engineers must patch the operating systems as soon as possible after vulnerabilities are announced so that hackers can’t exploit them before the fix is released. Threat actors continue to run vulnerabilities scanning against their targets, looking for exposed and exploitable hosts.
Impact on the organization when patching falls behind
Patching is not always done promptly when a critical or high-priority vulnerability is detected. According to the State of Enterprise Linux Security Management study, only 29% of organizations can patch vulnerabilities within two weeks. 44% of organizations say it takes a month to fix vulnerabilities. In comparison, 56% say it can take an average of five weeks to more than one year.
What are the risks?
The Linux operating system has over 30 million lines (source) of code, and in January 2023, the stable Linux version will have 1000 commits across distribution types. It is not unusual for a stable Linux version to receive 25 patches every working hour. Many of these patches deal with potential vulnerabilities. System administrators must protect their estates from critical vulnerability exploits.
Automation and optimization for patching Linux systems
Automation is a crucial component of DevOps that facilitates the patch management feature of large environments. The ability to script deployments, including patches across cross-platform environments, saves SysAdmins and DevOps engineers significantly in administrative tasks, reducing repeatable steps and decreasing error rate.
Leveraging automatic patch downloading workflows will allow for continuous patching and updating of the Linux kernel without needing change control and rebooting. Live patching interacts with an internet-based portal for updated and on-premise airgap deployed proxy service.
Value of Live patching without a formal change control
Adopting a Linux patch management system can help determine which updates are needed for each server. It also allows you automatically obtain those updates and deploy them to the correct servers.
Tuxcare live patching is an automatic security patching solution for Linux systems. It works by updating the running kernel, shared libraries, and other critical components without requiring a system restart.
What can I do to protect my organization?
Timely updating and patching of your systems have the most significant impact on your security. It sounds simple, but most companies are chronically late in patching their systems, and many don’t seem to patch at all. Why is that?
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The hacker’s rule of thumb is most PHP and other systems’ time to patch a vulnerability or patch (MTTP) is between 60 and 150 days. SecOps usually send out a patch within 38 days on average.
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Security compliance mandates include PCI-DSS, NIST-800-53, SOC 2, and HIPAA, which require organizations to maintain updated patches for all production systems interacting with regulated data.
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Failure to maintain patches exposed the organization’s cybersecurity risk, impacted its compliance status, and impacted its ability to deliver its products and services to its clients.
With live patching and long-term support from TuxCare, you can avoid those pitfalls and expensive setbacks while staying safe and industry compliant.
We update your systems with rapidly deployed security patches and support for legacy systems faster than anyone in the industry. That means your business never has to stop or take a step back.
Learn more about how TuxCare can protect your organization
While KernelCare has become a beloved brand to reduce security risks. These days we do a lot more than just take care of the kernel; we protect a wide range of open source libraries, databases, packages, and languages.
FAQs
Ransomware malware attacks clients’ networks by moving laterally. The malware will propagate from one host to another. If one of the host systems is unpatched, this becomes an attack vector to exploit all others in the network.
They are continually increasing cybersecurity, stability, and availability of Linux servers and devices since 2009.
Tuxcare offers clients extended life support (ELS) security patches even when the manufacturers have ended their sponsorship.
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