Good afternoon, everyone.

This is week four of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The theme for 2026 Cybersecurity Awareness Month is Don’t Make It Easy for Them; and by building and repeating strong security habits every day, we can all make life more difficult for the cybercriminals. Each week this month I am giving simple tips for how to stay safe online. Today’s topic is Update Software.

Keeping your software updated, whether it is the operating system or an online game, is such an important step for protecting your devices from security threats. At UTIA, we value the importance of those updates, and we want to make sure we can do everything possible to protect the Institute’s data and employees.

When a UTIA-owned computer is set up, it is added to ManageEngine’s Endpoint Central which is a Unified Endpoint Management and security platform that lets us manage and secure UTIA-owned devices. These are just some of the things Endpoint Central does:

• Patch Management automatically scans, tests, and deploys operating system and third-party patches.
• Software Deployment installs and uninstalls commercial software using a template library of over 10,000 applications.
• Asset and Inventory Management tracks hardware and software inventories, software license compliance, and peripheral device restrictions.
• Endpoint Security offers features like browser security monitoring, vulnerability management, and data loss prevention.

With these helpful core capabilities, Endpoint Central automatically installs your OS patches and updates, third-party app updates, and browser updates for you so you don’t have to remember to do them. The key thing you need to do, though, is to make sure you reboot your devices regularly (at least once a week!) and don’t put it off if you get a UTIA message that you need to reboot. Chances are your reboot will happen on its own, but some updates don’t fully install until the reboot has completed. And keep in mind that some OS updates won’t install until a different one has been completed, including the reboot.

All this works pretty smoothly for your UTIA-owned devices, but please don’t forget to do the updates on your personally owned devices as well. Not updating your software leaves your devices exposed to security vulnerabilities, malware, ransomware, system errors, slow devices. and compatibility issues. It is so much easier for you to be proactive!

Thank you so much for all you do to keep the Institute and its data safe. Please don’t ever hesitate to let me know when you have questions or concerns!

Sandy

Important Note: Thank you so much for sharing these e-newsletters with family, friends, clients, students, and anyone else who may benefit from the information. I would like to stress that you should keep your students in mind, as non-employee students will not get this information without someone sharing. If anyone has an email group for students who are not employees of your department, please let me know what that address is, and I can include it. I do this as a blind copy so student names and addresses will not show up!