Patches and updates come up a lot in the computer world these days. It seems like every time you turn your computer on or open an app, you are told there are patches and updates available. But what are patches? And what are updates? Are they the same thing? Or are they different? Why are they presented to you so often?

On June 14th, we held our June Advantage Lunch at Edgewood Country Club. We invited our friends from SonicWall to talk about SWARM reports.

A SWARM report is an assessment that helps customers identify real-time vulnerabilities and network threats. Each SWARM report is easy to navigate and features a Security Index score based on current network activity and any security threats that have been identified by SonicWall’s next-generation firewalls. SWARM reports help customers prevent any cyber threat surprises.

Starting in January, the entire Advantage Technology team began our Weight Loss Competition. And this is not just for mere bragging rights; cash prizes were offered to everyone who lost a certain amount of weight. We started off by dividing into teams of four with a total of twelve teams. After the initial weigh-in, we struggled to lose every ounce until finally, twelve weeks later, we had the official weigh-in. The team to lose the most percentage of weight got to walk home with a cool $500 each!

Watch as the winners were announced live on Facebook:

On October 16, 2017, Belgian security researchers made public their findings that demonstrated fundamental design flaws in WPA2 that could lead to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on wireless networks.

Named KRACKs, or key reinstallation attacks, this technique can theoretically be used by attackers to steal sensitive information from unsuspecting wireless users leveraging these flaws in the WiFi standard. Based on their research, CERT issued a series of CVEs to address this flaw, and most vendors affected have issued patches as of this writing.

You’ve probably heard about the Equifax data breach. And you’ve probably noticed an uptick in the conversation about cybersecurity. There’s a really simple reason why stories like this are happening more and more frequently; we simply aren’t taking cybersecurity seriously.