We have seen a lot of ransomware attacks across across various industries. When it comes to ransomware, no industry is safe. Recently, there was a suspected casino ransomware attack in Las Vegas. Yes, it turns out some casinos are just as vulnerable as the rest of the business population and the potential for damage is huge. Even some of the casinos with good protection can fall victim to phishing and ransomware attacks.
Security researcher Dan Wheeler has a succinct statement, “If someone wants to hack a casino, it’s surprisingly just about how easily can you get into their networks. If you are inside their networks, and they don’t segregate their networks properly, you’ll be able to interact with all kinds of machines, from the slot machines to even the card shufflers and camera systems.” He cites, one of the most important things to do to protect a network from ransomware is to segment it.
But don’t stop there. You should be doing software security updates, aka patching software, every month on both operating systems and applications. It’s also important to implement 2FA and make sure antivirus software is current and on all devices. Other protective measures that you should be doing include: review and update firewall rules, use email spam filtering/malware scanning services, have good backups that are separate from your network, don’t let users have admin privileges or rights beyond what they need to do their jobs, and monitoring servers and PCs for ransomware infections, to name some of the most choice security tools you should be using.
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Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.