Cybersecurity Education Series for Nonprofits – Outdated Software Concerns

Utilizing current and up-to-date software is one of the most essential things an organization can do to help increase productivity, modernization of operations and infrastructure, and prevention of security risks. However, many organizations in the nonprofit space are behind the curve in keeping their systems updated for support and security-related issues. In this blog post, we discuss the dangers of continuing to use outdated software and how it can put your nonprofit at risk.

What is considered outdated software?

Software normally has a planned obsolescence period. Planned obsolescence means that items become outdated once there are changes in design, supply, and usage. Therefore, they have a limited lifecycle, which means users must regularly update or upgrade. After a new update or upgrade of a software, vendors will in many instances, stop releasing patches, updates, and customer support for a previous version. The software becomes challenging to operate and harder to integrate with modernized and newer applications. Further, lack of patches or updates to software allows hackers to potentially exploit these vulnerable programs/systems causing disruption and/or wide-scale compromise to an environment.

Stay up to date

There are many systems, databases, programs, and other software that have reached end-of-life or will reach end-of-life in 2022 and will/are no longer supported by the vendor. Fortunately, most outdated software can be easily updated/upgraded to the latest version supported by the vendor. This will help mitigate security risks associated with outdated and unsupported software or infrastructure, such as hackers potentially being able to bypass authentication and gain access to systems or data due to unpatched software.

How CLA can help?

CLA’s cybersecurity team has a deep understanding of the current threat landscape and can assist with software and data management and education around outdated software. CLA can also assist with software policy development. Don’t go it alone. Learn more here and reach out if you have any questions.

This content was written by Javier Young, CLA’s Cybersecurity Principal.

Keep Pace with Our Cybersecurity Education Series for Nonprofits

Series Introduction

Security Basics I

Security Basics II

Security Basics III

Vulnerability Assessments

Credit Card and Online Donations