Why Microsoft released its largest ever security patch | Ryan Bridge TODAY

[00:00:00]Microsoft has just released the largest security update in its history addressing 600 vulnerabilities compared to the typical 50 to 100. Paul Spain, Gorilla Technology CEO, has the details with us this morning. Paul, good morning.

[00:00:11]>> Good morning.

[00:00:12]>> So, big update. Does that mean they found bigger problems?

[00:00:17]>> This is a reflection that Microsoft are applying AI in the background to analyze all their software and look for security bugs. And this is this is what they found, a massive number of vulnerabilities.

[00:00:29]Fortunately, they've addressed them. The challenge here is the pace at which this is happening. So, this is five to 10 times as many vulnerabilities as we've seen before. Some of these are what we call zero-day vulnerabilities. So, that means there are already cybercriminals that are taking advantage of these issues. So, as soon as those updates come came out, we need to start moving. And this is this is a problem because often here, whether it's in New Zealand or around the world, we're quite slow at getting our computers updated and our technology systems.

[00:01:04]That needs to speed up a lot more than what it is today.

[00:01:09]Add to what Microsoft have done. We saw on Saturday, New Zealand time, that WordPress had a similar type of vulnerability that would let anybody through the front door at administration level and to take out any WordPress website. Now, the reason this is such an issue with WordPress is that in New Zealand, there would be tens of thousands of websites running on WordPress. Around the world, in the hundreds of millions. So, a major major vulnerability.

[00:01:40]Fortunately, the doors on these things are are closing reasonably quickly.

[00:01:44]>> Who's been targeted?

[00:01:45]>> This is the interesting thing. The In a lot of cases, there's no discrimination. So, anybody with a website online or anybody with a computer system is um is basically at risk because the attackers will will go for anybody that they can reach in an online context.

[00:02:07]>> And AI helping or hindering the threats?

[00:02:09]>> Um it's it's it's on both sides. I think what we've what we've seen this month from Microsoft uh is they're they're really leaning into AI to help protect against these threats, but that's that's no good if we haven't taken care of the basics.

[00:02:27]Organizations still need to make sure they're getting things right with backups, with passwords, with not giving uh their team members access to more uh data than they should. Everybody needs to have in place an incident response plan. So, there's lots of work to do, but I think the message is starting to get out and you know, I hope we'll we'll address these things well as a country.

[00:02:52]>> Absolutely. Hey, good to see this morning.

[00:02:54]Paul, thank you very much. That's Paul Spain, Gorilla Tech CEO with us this morning for Tech It Is.