Update to Intel’s Spectre and Meltdown – Part 2

Owners of older PCs with Windows 10 are waiting desperately for BIOS updates. The affected CPUs need these updates to protect Windows 10 against Spectre (variant 2) – but Microsoft doesn’t provide them. As an alternative there is now an optional Windows update.

Windows update KB4090007 for Windows 10

Hoping for BIOS updates for Intel processors from the years 2013 and 2014 has come to an end. With its latest version from the 24 April 2018  the optional Windows update KB4090007 provides not only microcode updates for Coffee Lake (Core i-8000), Kaby Lake (i-7000) and Skylake (i-6000) but also for Broadwell (i-5000) und Haswell (i-4000). The update is available for 32- and for 64-Bit versions of Windows 10 – still it can only be downloaded via the Windows Update Catalog  over an unsecured http connection. Windows 10 PCs with Intel Atom processors still need BIOS updates.

KB4090007 also has a solution for another problem: In December 2017 Microsoft has provided BIOS updates with Microcode updates for some devices but the PowerShell-Script Get-SpeculationControl still reports no BTI protection.

Meltdown patches for Windows 7

Microsoft doesn’t provide Microcode updates for Windows 7 via Windows update because in this case BIOS updates are necessary. At the end of March some major problems occurred concerning the Meltdown patches for the 64-bit versions. These problems are known as the “Total Meltdown”. Those who followed installing these patches from the beginning on, are protected against Total Meltdown.

To make sure whether you’re protected a PoC (Proof of Concept)  was published.

Source: heise

 

##Read the first part of our Spectre and Meltdown series

##Read the last update on spectre and Meltdown

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