H5. Perform routine maintenance

Description: Regular maintenance and upkeep is important for operating systems and software, just as it is for your car or house. In order to take advantage of patches to security vulnerabilities, more secure workflows, and general ease-of-use, update your systems on a regular basis. Or better yet, have updates automatically downloaded and installed everywhere possible.

As equally important as maintaining current software, uninstall software not used. It is not unusual for software to become vulnerable over time and neglected because it is no longer being used.

Threats: Out of date software can have security vulnerabilities publicly known for which there are easy and automated attacks. The software you don’t use is more likely to suffer from neglect and become less secure over time. Additionally, unused software needlessly provides more areas an attacker can attempt to exploit.

Impact: Systems, devices, and accounts which are unused or out-of-date can be exploited and lead to compromise of personal systems and accounts. This can lead to the disclosure of personal and private data, loss of access to systems, accounts, and data, and impersonation of your identity.

Recommendations:

Consumers should focus on:

1. Use current version of software and enable auto-updates where possible
2. Regularly patch your systems – Computers, phones, routers, WiFi, etc.
3. Use modern browsers

Tech-savvy users should also:

1. Uninstall unsafe software, including Java, Shockwave, Flash
2. Uninstall software you don’t use
3. Regularly run external port scans to check for unused services

Example: Unpatched systems are frequently targeted by hackers. A number of nasty, well-publicized attacks could be prevented by keeping your system up to date.