14 DAY TRIAL // Believe it or not, patching does have its downside. This article is about two things that can go bad when patching.
Many users know that repairing flaws is the best thing to do when talking about cyber-security. Well, they're not wrong - bugs need to be fixed, to avoid giving hackers an advantage. But some malicious users got a lot smarter over time, that's why it's advised to download updates only from authorized sites.
You may browse the web and get a pop-up or see a banner saying that your Opera browser is out of data and that you need to update it to avoid any nasty things. I wasn't even running that browser when I got the message. Didn't bother to click, anyway. Some malicious users will go and upload infected files and state that they're critical updates for some renowned programs. Don't fall for that - download from official pages and stay safe!
Then, there's another issue - how anti-viruses work when scanning. After patching up a certain program, you just might change the very core of that software. This is not to affect the way you work with it too much, but it just might affect the way it gets scanned.
As Alex Hinchliffe of McAfee said in a conference, anti-Virus engines will not exhaustively interrogate them during scanning. So if the integrity of the file has been jeopardized, engines rely on some other malicious object to hopefully reveal itself such that they can positively identify malicious behavior.
So, the question is - should you always run updates? Well, if you do, you will get rid of some vulnerabilities, but you never know how this will affect your overall security, unless you are really, really tech-savvy and can tell what has changed within the nucleus of the program after reading what the update actually does.
My advice is to patch up vulnerabilities only with patches from official sites. As for security - there is no such thing as 100% secure!