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Updated October 9, 2023The software on your devices provides an opening to bad actors as well—software is made by people, and it often has mistakes or bugs that crop up that can be misused. Imagine an attacker delivers an email that looks like an invoice, sent via a macro-enabled Word document. Most likely, that document has a script that will try to take advantage of a bug that hasn’t been patched in your operating system software. Software developers release patches that contain security fixes to close these bugs, but it is up to us to actually make sure we apply them.
important Enable automatic updates within your mobile or desktop operating system. Keeping software updated means you’ll always have the latest security protections. Most operating systems now allow you to set updates to happen automatically; be sure these are switched on. Mobile phones usually do a good job of telling you when an update is available, and will even auto-update your apps when you plug it in to charge while connected to wifi. Windows, macOS, and Linux on laptops are also usually configured to automatically update, but now is the best time to double-check.
It is important to set these to automatic, because the last thing you will be thinking about when running your business is “Am I protected from that latest Windows vulnerability?” News like that might not even make it to your radar, so having automatic updates gives you that peace of mind.
You also want to make sure that your software is still supported—Apple has a history of supporting their device software longer than other competitors, but that doesn’t mean the other competitors are unsafe. The window of support is just shorter, which might force you to update to a newer device sooner than you would like. If a device no longer receives software updates, that is a sign you need to upgrade. Since this device is critical to you and your business, it has a wealth of information and access stored on it.
danger If software is no longer supported, then any weaknesses found in that software won’t be patched and the risk of losing that data is higher. The longer those weaknesses stick around, the more accessible they become and the more dangerous it is. Here is your business justification for investing in new technology!
After you have taken care of keeping what software you have downloaded up to date, it is time for a review of what software you actually have running on your device in the first place.
Before starting your business, you might have been a bit laissez-faire with the software or apps you downloaded. Now that you use those same personal devices for business, you need to be a bit pickier. That doesn’t mean you can’t download what you want, it just means the consequences of bad downloads no longer affect just you—they can also affect your business.
For example, downloading a social media app like TikTok to your mobile device before might have seemed harmless, despite the laundry list of permissions it asked for and vague terms-of-service wording. But who reads those when they are using something for personal use anyways (except me and other huge nerds)? However, if you have both business and personal contacts and data on your phone, TikTok would now be able to slurp up both.
Now is a great time to do some spring cleaning of your device software and apps, and see which ones you use and need, and which can go. Similar to how we cleaned up apps with third-party access to our email, if you are unsure if you need it or not, remove it and challenge that decision later if you find yourself needing it again. This is especially the case for any software that asks for permission to data that it really doesn’t make sense to need. When you open Apple Maps and it asks for your permission to share your location so it can give you more accurate directions, those permissions make sense. What doesn’t make sense is that Sudoku app you downloaded to kill time asking for permission to read your text messages.