Patch Tuesday May 2020: all the may security flowers you need for your small business.
Apple Bytes
Apple released iOS 13.5 May 20th. Besides security fixes, Apple also added a feature that makes it easier to unlock your phone when wearing a mask. I’ve tested this and it does help. Apple also added their notification system for COVID contact tracing. More details about iOS 13.5 here.
Apple released updates fixing 63 vulnerabilities in their products ranging from the iWatch to Mac OS X. More details here.
Apple also added a battery health management feature to Mac OS X Catalina. Enabling this feature, and yes, you have to enable this new feature, is supposed to lengthen the life of your battery by predicting your power usage and reducing it’s charge. I’m always leery of power management plans that “help” you reduce power usage. I’ve seen too many manufacturer power plans that make Windows computers almost unusable with their help. Enable this feature at your own risk.
Adobe Agony
Adobe released two batches of security updates this month. The first batch on May 12th fixed vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Adobe released updates for Premier Pro and Premier Audition on May 19th. Patch the Reader and Acrobat as soon as possible. Hackers love poisoned PDFs, patching helps prevent those PDFs. More details about the May Adobe security updates here.
If you missed the Creative Cloud Desktop update in March, install it as soon as possible. I’ve seen several computers that struggled with speed until that update was installed.
Microsoft Patches
Microsoft released patches for 111 security problems in Windows and related software. Microsoft labeled 16 of these as critical which means likely to exploited by hackers. There’s some debate about what Microsoft labels as a critical vulnerability versus serious. More details about this here.
Microsoft just released Windows 10 version 2004. Here are details on the improvements. I haven’t tested this yet. As it is a major release, be sure to have a good backup before upgrading to this version.
Patch Tuesday May 2020: make some time to install updates. An ounce of patching is cheaper than a pound of hacking.