Automatic Updates

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Hoping to share some tips this month to help you strengthen your personal Cyber security at home
This week we’ll look at Automatic Updates

Software and Hardware companies regularly release updates that either plague us with notifications to UPDATE NOW!!! or will sit there patiently waiting for you to notice them which you won’t install until something isn’t working quite right. Some of these updates introduce new features, others improve the performance, or provide security enhancements to keep the software bug free and resilient against exploitation.

In all cases, your computer or device will run better and more securely if these updates are applied. Most devices offer a way to set updates to be automatically fetched and applied, this is a good thing to turn on. 
“But when is a good time to schedule these for?” I hear you say.
We call it Patch Tuesday, it’s the second Tuesday of the month and it’s when all the major software and hardware companies typically release updates. 

There may be reasons why an update hasn’t automatically applied, there will also be patches and updates released outside this schedule so it’s a good thing to check in on it from time to time. If you start checking it once a month, that may be up to 12 times more in a year that you have checked it than in previous years. BAM!! Statistics. 
But seriously, its a great start.
Oh also, in Australia and NZ, Patch Tuesday falls on Wednesday. Just to be confusing.

More reading (Including instructions for automatic updates):
https://www.cyber.gov.au/acsc/view-all-content/guidance/update-software-regularly

Cyber security tips this month are taken from https://www.cyber.gov.au/acsc/view-all-content/advice/personal-security-guides which is a really good read