The Importance of Rebooting

Security Operations

Why is reboot required?

Rebooting helps the device to work better by clearing the temporary files stored in RAM, clears any process that is stuck inside the memory due to glitches and installs the new updates.

From a security point of view, it is important to patch up with the necessary updates released by the software providers. Enabling automatic updates will push your software to download and install the latest updates. After updating, many software requests will be either to restart the software or the entire device. Until a restart, these updates will not come to execution. This is because it cannot do modification to those files which is already being held by other running process.

Importance of Rebooting

Many people are working from home and have the practice of just putting their laptop in sleep mode or just closing the lid without shutting down. As we do this, the computer freezes the running state of the machine and de-freezes when we open it. Thereby, postponing the system restart for completing the updates.

As many people are working from home, cyber crooks take this as an opportunity to compromise the sensitive data. The security bugs that are identified from a software or from an operating system can be fixed by updating the software released by the concern developers. There are many serious security updates in these days. Researchers keeps on patching it even in applications like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other major applications. We may think that we have enabled automatic updates but still some applications do need a restart for proper modification and execution. Only some updates will force for a restart whereas other updates get installed and remain silent.

Today I read an article that says Chrome users to update. I checked my Chrome whether it is updated or not, and I found that it is up-to-date and recommends me to restart the chrome for complete impact. As a cyber security analyst I am aware of these things, but a normal user does not check these manually. So, I would suggest you all to restart or shutdown your computer periodically which loads the latest modifications and keeps the system updated.

Revanth Kumar
SOC Analyst, CommSec