Kaspersky Labs makes some of the best antivirus software in the business. Odds are excellent that your company uses their product to keep your systems and data safe. That’s what made this week’s announcement about the flaw in their software so dismaying.
Worse, it wasn’t just an obscure flaw that was difficult to take advantage of. The recently discovered flaw was the equivalent of leaving all your doors standing wide open, with a formal invitation, written in neon, inviting hackers in. It had the potential to be absolutely devastating, which is why the company released an emergency patch to address it.
The good news is that if you use Kaspersky products, and you have your auto-update feature turned on, you’ve already got the patch. If you don’t use auto-update, you’ll want to instruct your IT people to manually check for and apply the latest updates, or you are at risk.
The IT field is vast, and growing almost by the day. One of the fastest growing segments in the industry is in systems security. The problem, of course, is that it is ruinously expensive to keep one (or more) of each type of IT Professional on your payroll, but you don’t have to. As the IT industry continues to expand, it makes an increasing amount of sense to simply outsource the function to a managed services provider, hiring the specific type of IT consultant you need, when you need it.
Could an IT consultant specializing in systems security have alerted you to the presence of this bug sooner? Possibly. More importantly, however, such an individual could have guaranteed that when the bug was detected, your system would have been patched and safe the moment it was found, instead of having to read about the problem online, then check behind your staff to ensure that your data is secure.
Final note: Kaspersky is by no means unique. They’re not the only antivirus software makers to have had security flaws identified within their products. This happens to every software manufacturer. Kaspersky just happens to be the most recent company making headlines. This is in no way a reason to consider dropping them. They were incredibly responsive and the issue has been addressed, but it does underscore the ever-present danger and uncertainty in today’s business environment.