Death, taxes and software updates… We deal with a constant stream of updates: Minor, major, N, N-1, N-2. Why do we even have updates? Because software inherently sucks and bad people find ways to exploit the vulnerabilities that they find, or is it that good people find them and disclose them before the bad people get a chance to use them... If simply applying these software updates wasn’t hard enough, we also need to understand what devices are eligible for which updates, and may have auditing responsibilities to make decisions as to why and how quickly we need to apply them. SOFA is an open source tool that MacAdmins can use to help with automation, documentation and many other aspects associated with keeping our bloody software up to date

Hosts:

• Tom Bridge - @tbridge@theinternet.social
• Marcus Ransom - @marcusransom

Guests:

• Henry Stamerjohann, Co-founder, Zentral - LinkedIn
• Graham Pugh, Senior Systems Engineer, Jamf - LinkedIn
• Allister Banks, Citizen of Earth - LinkedIn

Links:

• https://github.com/macadmins/sofa
• https://sofa.macadmins.io
• https://github.com/bartreardon/swiftDialog-scripts/tree/main/Update%20Notifications
• https://eclecticlight.co/lockrattler-systhist/
• https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
• https://docs.vulncheck.com/community/nist-nvd/introduction
• https://grahamrpugh.com/2023/12/06/xprotect-version-check.html
• https://grahamgilbert.com/blog/2024/05/03/investigating-unpatched-cves-with-osquery-and-sofa/
• https://github.com/macadmins/nudge
• https://github.com/macadmins/osquery-extension

Sponsors:

• Kandji
• 1Password
• Watchman Monitoring

If you're interested in sponsoring the Mac Admins Podcast, please email podcast@macadmins.org for more information.

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The Mac Admins Podcast has launched a Patreon Campaign! Our named patrons this month include Weldon Dodd, Damien Barrett, Justin Holt, Chad Swarthout, William Smith, Stephen Weinstein, Seb Nash, Dan McLaughlin, Joe Sfarra, Nate Cinal, Jon Brown, Dan Barker, Tim Perfitt, Ashley MacKinlay, Tobias Linder Philippe Daoust, AJ Potrebka, Adam Burg, & Hamlin Krewson