2025 Cybersecurity Awareness Month Tip – Updating Your Software

This might not sound like a cybersecurity topic, but keeping the software up to date on your computer, phone, tablet, smart watch, health tracker, and any other electronic device you have is one of the most important steps you can take to keeping your devices and your data safe.  Many of the patches that software vendors send out are designed to fix security holes on those devices.  If you don’t install the patches then you are leaving a door open on your device that a hacker might be able to use to steal your personal information or install malicious software.

Many devices are designed to automatically install updates.  ITS strongly recommends that you configure your devices to do this.  It’s the easiest way to stay safe, as you don’t need to do anything after configuring your device to install those updates.

Looking through the logs of the devices that were used to connect to Fairfield systems in the past 30 days we can see that only 27% of Android devices and 12% of iOS devices have been patched to the current version of their operating systems.

The instructions to check if your Android devices are automatically installing updates are at https://support.google.com/android/answer/7680439.
The instructions to check if your iOS devices are automatically installing updates are at https://support.apple.com/en-us/118575.