Checking for windows update from Command Prompt


For security reasons, it is important to ensure that your system is properly secured by ensuring it has the necessary security updates/Patch required.
This post will focus on how to identify the status of your patch update. It will be done thorough the command line


A patch is a set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, with such patches usually being called bugfixes or bug fixes, and improving the usability or performance.

KB means Knowledge Base. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Knowledge Base is a repository of over 200,000 articles made available to the public by Microsoft Corporation. It contains information on many problems encountered by users of Microsoft products. Each article bears an ID number and articles are often referred to by their Knowledge Base (KB) ID

Microsoft releases their security updates through the Knowledge Base when there is a need to patch a vulnerability detected in the current operating system. Thus it is important that your system has the most recent Knowledge Base update.

In this post we will be using a command called WMIC.
WMIC is the Windows Management Instrumentation Command line (WMIC). This is a software utility that allows users to performs Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) operations with a command prompt.
This command can only be used to retrieve updates for Windows operating system and its components (such as Windows Internet Explorer (IE) or Windows Server roles and features).
So lets begin with the basics (Yeah it could get complicated  with the use of power shell)

To list all installed updates
C:/>wmic qfe list full

When searching for a particular Knowledge Base say KB3174644
C:/>wmic qfe list |find "KB3174644"

To have it in detail form
C:/>wmic qfe list full

To spool it to a file
In this example below i will spool the list to a text file called Patch_List.txt in the location "C:\Users\tayo\Documents\Patch_List.txt"

C:/>wmic qfe list>C:\Users\tayo\Documents\Patch_List.txt

To get the latest security update go to the url below:

https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security-guidance/summary

Note that a Knowledge Base contain all the prior Knowledge Bases, thus there will be no need for multiple installation.

Eg
Supposing you missed the installation of  KB01, KB02,KB03 and KB04 but you were able to get KB05. It is advisable to install only KB05 as it will contain all previous KBs (KB01....04)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Auditing Virtualization

Image
Virtualization is the process of creating virtual, representation of an entity, such as virtual applications, servers, storage and networks. It is the single most effective way to reduce IT expenses by reducing hardware footprint while boosting efficiency and agility for all size businesses. However good as it is, virtualization can create a single point of failure if poor implementation introduced a security flaw to the system. In this post I will be sharing with you how to audit virtualization.
Read more

How to Identify if the capacity of your FLASH storage device is genuine or counterfeit

Image
Have you at some time purchased a flash drive  or memory card that always stored corrupt data? You paid for a 64gig memory card and all you stored in it is simply just got corrupted. I have been a victim several times even with reputable retailers. These counterfeit flash storages are low capacity in nature, devices that have been maliciously altered so that they appear to have much more capacity than its original. An example is the 64 gig memory card I purchased which ended up having actual capacity of 2gig. So I actually paid for 2gig. Now I didn't get to know this on time because I actually copied a video file inside it as a test which checked out fine. The video file size was 1.5gb. I was able to play the video with no issue of corruption. Thus I "Assumed" the flash was genuine. Boy was I wrong. Later in the week I decided to do a major backup of my mobile phone since I was purchasing another one. After the backup, I formatted ...
Read more

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP): Understanding the basics

Image
Address resolution Protocol or ARP for short is basically used to resolve an IP address to a MAC address. A MAC address is a unique identifier for any device. And since we are talking networking today, The mac address we will be concentration on is that of a network device. Its important to note that, no two device can have the same mac address. Whenever a network device needs to communicate with another network device in a Local Area Network, it needs the MAC address of that device. This is where ARP comes to play. Lets take a look at the scenario bellow to clearly understand this concept: 1. There are 2 computers say A and B on the network. 2. They have both been assigned an IP address as seen below:        A: 192.168.0.1        B: 192.168.0.2 3. Computer A needs to communicate with computer B. 4. It looks at a list for the IP address to see if it has a corresponding MAC address. This list is called an ARP Cache. 5. If the en...
Read more