Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

This was the biggest Patch Tuesday on record: Microsoft pushed close to 700 patches in a single month, roughly six times the usual volume. Craig's follow-up question is the one that actually decides whether a machine is exposed. Microsoft is patching Microsoft. Who is patching everything else? Windows Update never touches third-party software — it barely updates Windows itself, Craig said, and it does nothing for the average of 62 other programs sitting on a typical computer, many of which are being actively exploited right now. He named Adobe Reader and WinZip specifically: the current versions are reasonably solid, but almost nobody can say for certain they are running the current version. His phrasing for the gap: vulnerabilities "like driving a truck into your living room and you don't even notice." The question came in from a listener — Andy in Sanford texted to ask what Craig thought of PC-matic. Craig gave a genuinely mixed answer rather than a pitch. PC-matic is whitelist-based rather than blacklist-b