Over the past few years, a wide variety of security vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Windows operating system. These vulnerabilities have allowed an equally wide number of viruses and Trojans to infect users' machines, causing untold damage to those systems. In extreme cases, machines have been completely destroyed with no possibility of recovery. In other extreme cases, the vulnerabilities have allowed hostile entities to assume full control over a vulnerable machine, executing arbitrary code at random.

In order to maintain a high level of information security on campus, customers of Information Technology who have non-standard campus installed machines are urged to patch their systems on a regular schedule. On-campus customers who have standard campus installed machines automatically receive the latest updates once the updates have been thoroughly tested and approved by IT. Customers who use Windows should enable Automatic Updates. This will allow your machine to visit Windows Update every time you connect to the Internet and download critical security patches in the background. The added advantage to using Automatic Updates is that if you are disconnected from the Internet unexpectedly, the update process will remember where it left off and continue downloading when you connect again.

Customers should also manually visit Windows Update from time to time to obtain less critical patches as well as to double-check that the most up-to-date patches have been installed on their systems. Again, this only applies to customers with non-campus standard installed machines.

Patching early and often goes hand-in-hand with continually updating anti-virus software. As IT has seen in the past, it does a customer no good to update a system with anti-virus software if their machine will only become infected again the moment it connects to the Internet again. You will need to patch your machine FIRST, and then apply anti-virus software to clean up any infection that may have occurred while your machine was vulnerable.

To patch your Windows machine with the latest in critical security updates, logon to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com . Note that this requires the use of Windows Internet Explorer as other browsers are incompatible with the Windows Update Web site.

Macintosh and Linux users should also patch their machines as often as possible. Although security vulnerabilities for Linux and Macintosh machines are not as well publicized as for Windows users, they still exist and need to be addressed.

Patching Macintosh machines:

• OS X 10.3

  To update go to the Apple menu and select Software Update.... This checks for updates from Apple and displays all available unapplied updates in a dialog. Updates that it detects as applying to your computer are automatically checked. Selecting an update entry will give a brief description in the lower panel of the dialog box. Any update can be selected or deselected using the checkboxes. When the selection is complete, click Install to start the installation process.

  Note: Updating the computer requires administrator privileges and the user may be prompted to enter their username and password. If this is not accepted then the user is not an administrator.

• OS X 10.2 & OS X 10.3

  The system software can be updated by using System Preferences. Go to the Apple menu and click System Preferences.... In the System Preferences window select Software Updates in the System panel. Click Check Now to open the software update dialog and proceed as above.

  You can also set automatic periodic downloads of software updates using the Software Updates item in the System Preferences.

If you have any questions or comments about patching your machine, please contact the IT Help Desk at 341-HELP or submit an online Help Request at http://help.mst.edu . IT is strongly committed to maintaining the highest level of information security for our campus customers.