Cybersecurity experts from FireEye published a series of studies in 2021 on exploiting software vulnerabilities.
Microsoft products became the leaders in the number of weak points because of the wide use of this operating system. Attackers exploit almost half of the vulnerabilities after deploying security patches.
It's possible to reduce the probability of hacking by implementing regular updates for the operating system, network, server, peripheral equipment, and other software, especially with Internet access: browsers, messengers, and mail clients. It is essential to use software officially supported by the vendor. Developers identify product vulnerabilities as quickly as possible and provide the updates that fix them. The vendor sets individual update regularity for products. But the main thing is that the longer you keep outdated or unpatched software running in your organization, the higher the risk of a network hack.
You should pay particular attention to updating the operating system on the servers. There is an opinion that Linux operating systems are not prone to attacks, but this is not so - the number of vulnerabilities on the Linux platform is less than on Windows, but the risk is also there. Do not forget to update the virtualization environment and firmware of physical servers. If you rent resources in the cloud, ask the provider how it secures the service and how often it updates its components.