Episode 378: Henry, Allister, & Graham join us on the Mac Admins SOFA

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

• Tom Bridge - @[email protected]
• 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 [email protected] for more information.

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