Government Computer News
Patch tactics
Alabama National Guard finds a cure for patch management headaches
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Lessons learned
Key to successful patching: Don’t be pushy
The point of a reliable, automated patch management system is to get those security patches rolled out, installed, and the endpoints rebooted as quickly as possible.
Not necessarily. When a mission is critical, sometimes it’s best to wait.
“With the restrictions that the military has, you have to have a product that is user friendly, so that if you are in the middle of something you can pause the patch,” said Jim Crawford, information security specialist for the Alabama National Guard. “Get a product that does that if you’re concerned about productivity.”
The Alabama National Guard has standardized on the PatchLink Update system to automate its security patch management on more than 2,000 workstations and servers.
“They are a pretty typical user,” said PatchLink vice president of security technologies Chris Andrew. Some agencies, such as the Veterans Affairs Department with 300,000 nodes or NASA with 80,000 nodes, are larger. But “the most typical installation is like this one.”
PatchLink tests and sends critical patches out to customer servers within 24 hours of receiving them from the vendors. It is up to the customer to decide when and how to deploy them.
Downloading and installing patches can interfere with some work, and rebooting the client to make the patch effective can be a problem if the user is in the middle of something critical. The user has the option of halting the process so it can be finished up at a more convenient time.
But an unpatched computer is at risk and eventually the job will have to be done, so administrators can set limits to how long the patching is delayed. At some point, a curfew can force the installation and the reboot.
The Alabama National Guard also has patching policies for each workgroup, taking office hours into account so that the installation and rebooting can be done routinely with as little disruption as possible.
That headache was only going to get bigger, because guardsmen issued Common Access Cards by the Defense Department must be given access to the Army’s Internet domain.
“We are going to have to support our 9,000 traditional National Guardsmen on a full-time basis,” Crawford said. That support will come by adding an additional six to eight computers at each National Guard site.
The Alabama National Guard has turned to the Update patch management system from PatchLink Corp. of Scottsdale, Ariz., to handle the growing job. The Army requires the Guard to be fully updated on its patches within 30 days of release, a deadline that Alabama now is able to beat by pushing out patches received through the Update subscription.
“In a week I can get it 90 percent patched,” Crawford said. “In two weeks I’m 100 percent.”
Software patches are a critical component in securing IT systems. This puts a premium on being able to trust a patch and automate its installation. PatchLink Update was not the first tool the Alabama Guard turned to for getting this job done. It started with Version 1 of Microsoft Corp.’s System Management Server, Crawford said.
“It didn’t work at all,” he said. “Then we migrated to v. 2.0 and it worked pretty good,” except that it had to be heavily tailored for the Guard’s environment. “That’s when I got disgusted with Microsoft.”
He also tried the Hercules vulnerability management tool from Citadel Security Software Inc. of Dallas. But Hercules could make unexpected changes.
There also were some problems with the 12-Kbps circuits that connected most of the Alabama sites. Both SMS and Hercules could eat up that bandwidth with batch distributions of patches. The state recently finished building out a Bell South network with T1 links to each National Guard site, and bandwidth no longer is a critical issue. But even before the upgrade, PatchLink was able to push out patches on an as-can basis without using up all the bandwidth.
PatchLink Update is a server-agent system with an online service for delivering new vendor patches to the customer’s server. Agents residing on client devices scan the system to determine what patches are needed and if they can be safely installed. They also can confirm successful installation and alert administrators when installation fails or creates a problem.
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