Cyber Essentials Section 5 - Patch Management

The Cyber Essentials is a UK government-backed framework which is designed to assist organisations in protecting themselves against common threats.  The Cyber Essentials provides a basic cyber security foundation that can serve as a stepping stone to a more comprehensive zero-trust approach. The Cyber Essentials is built on 5 key components that, when implemented correctly, can reduce cyber risk.  The five key components are:

1. Firewalls and Boundary Devices
2. Secure Configurations
3. Access Control
4. Malware Protection
5. Patch Management

Tenable has released a series of reports, that focuses on each of the five basic technical controls, which organisations can use to help strengthen their defences against the most common cyber threats.

The focus of this report is Section 5 - Patch Management.  Organisations which comply with Section 5 ensure they are actively fixing vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them, reducing risk, and demonstrating responsible security practices. In addition to reducing risk, compliance demonstrates that organisations take security seriously,  improving  trust with customers, partners, and regulators. 

This key component applies to all the following in scope devices: Boundary Firewalls, Desktop Computers, Laptops, Routers, Servers, Iaas, PaaS, and SaaS devices.  Some items to focus on within this key component are:

• Reducing exploitable weaknesses
• Keeping devices and software secure
• Limiting the window of risk (enforcing timely updates)

This report contains the following chapters:

• Outstanding Microsoft Remediations - Time since Patch Publication (Explore) - This chapter displays the total count of missing patches related to Microsoft Security Bulletins using the Windows: Microsoft Bulletins and Windows plugin families. 

• Unsupported Products by Application (Explore) - This chapter contains the Unsupported Products by Family bar chart which displays all unsupported products, sorted by Family.

• Unsupported and SEoL Assets (Explore) - This chapter provides a summary of the assets with unsupported or SEoL software.

• Assets with Unsupported OS (Explore) - This chapter displays assets by Operating System that have been detected as running an unsupported OS.