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Staying Up-to-date with Driver Updates

Staying up-to-date with your drivers maintains effective cybersecurity. Learn how to keep yours up to date.
Photographic image of laptop updating
In this section, you will learn about staying up-to-date with driver updates. Now, we already know that it’s important to update your operating system in your application software because there tends to be a lot of bugs or vulnerabilities that are found and fixed in the updates. But what about our drivers?

Driver updates are just as important. Updating your drivers for your computer is going to help with the stability of your computer. It’s going to patch vulnerabilities. And it may even add new features. In fact, more and more driver exploits are coming out. So, it’s important to always update your drivers.

Where to get your drivers?

If you built your computer, you can go to individual vendor websites to update those drivers. If you have a computer, such as a Dell, a Lenovo, Razer, go to the vendor manufacturer website; whoever built your computer. They will generally have drivers in a section dedicated to your particular model.

It is recommended that you take the time to understand your drivers once you’ve updated them because some of these manufacturers will modify those drivers slightly in order to run optimally with whatever device you use.

Over to you: An example of driver exploits are Meltdown and Spectre – research this further to learn more. Once complete, update your drivers. What have you learned in your research and what habits will you carry forward? Share in the comments below.

Now it’s time to concept-check and assess your progress by completing a Quiz —they’re just for practice, and the marks don’t count towards your final score. Quizzes are a useful informal way for you to see how you’re doing and help you check your understanding as you move through the course.

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Cyber Security Foundations: Why Cyber Security is Important

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