Getting Started with self-hosted Patchman. Kill Malware and Fix Vulnerable Websites.

Knowledgebase Article

Getting Started with self-hosted Patchman. Kill Malware and Fix Vulnerable Websites.

This article refers to clients using Cloud or Dedicated hosting solution.

Thank you for ordering Patchman. You've made the first step to more secure web sites.

In order to finalize the setup and for Patchman to start actioning events and tasks on your server, you will need to complete your Policy setup.

Policies determine what should happen to new detections, which end users should be notified and governs which end users are allowed to see their detections in the portal.

To do that, login to your Patchman dashboard and click on your Default policy.

You'll need to modify how you wish to respond to certain events (e.g. detections) and schedule tasks (e.g. patch or quarantine).

Vulnerabilities - We recommend sending a notification to your users as soon as a vulnerability is detected. Additionally, it is preferable to immediately patch the vulnerability, but you may also choose to give your users some time to update the applications themselves. In any case, it is always best to advise the user to update their software.

Malware - We recommend quarantining malware files as soon as possible, to prevent (further) abuse.

Outdated applications - We recommend scheduling the 'reminder' action rather than the 'detection' event to notify your users of outdated applications, to allow them to update their applications themselves. Furthermore, please take into account that the information about installed versions in the portal may be outdated until the next full server scan. Additionally, note that vulnerabilities in the same application may also be detected (see above).

Operational hours - Allows you to limit the hours in which policy actions are taken. Outside these hours, detections are still made, but no tasks are executed and no e-mail will be send to end-users. These actions will hold until operational hours are reached. This can be useful if you want to limit actions to only be performed when support staff is active.

For each event and task, you can optionally specify which email template is used to send an email to the end user.

For each message that is sent out by Patchman on behalf of your organization, you can fully customize the layout and contents. The layout and contents are specified on a per-policy basis, giving you the flexibility to provide different experiences for different users.

Each separate email template is inserted into the base template, which is used to define the email design. Each template consists of two parts:

A HTML template. This is the message most users will see when they open their email client and gives you the ability to include images and rich text layouts. However, note that most email clients are very limited in their HTML capabilities. By default, we will inline all CSS for you when rendering the email, but you should still verify the emails render like you expect them to in the most popular email clients.

A text template. This is the simplified version of your HTML template and can only contain simple text. This is used by all clients that don't support HTML. When editing your HTML template (base templates excluded), we will automatically try to get a text template out of it.

You can edit the base template by clicking the "Edit base template" button in the top right part of the Patchman dashboard.

More information about the email templates, Special tags and Template Context is available here: https://my.kualo.com/knowledgebase/99_patchman/1397_patchman:-email-template-editing.html

Once you complete the events and templates setup, let us know so we could fully activate your account.

Should you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.