Despite the tech new cycle moving on from the fear mongering headlines of OS threats Spectre and Meltdown, technology companies are still hard at work to help mitigate their real world impacts.
Some sleuthing on the part of Borns IT blog, unveils Microsoft’s latest attempt to combat persisting Spectre threats.
In its latest attempt to combat Spectre and Meltdown, Microsoft has released a slew of Intel microcode updates for its Windows 10 operating system. The recent releases are designed to combat various Spectre threats.
Intel recently announced that they have completed their validations and started to release microcode for recent CPU platforms related to Spectre Variant 3a (CVE-2018-3640: “Rogue System Register Read (RSRE)”), Spectre Variant 4 (CVE-2018-3639: “Speculative Store Bypass (SSB)”), L1TF (CVE-2018-3615, CVE-2018-3620, CVE-2018-3646: “L1 Terminal Fault”). In addition to microcode updates previously released in KB4100347 to address Spectre Variant 2 (CVE 2017-5715: “Branch Target Injection”), this update also includes microcode updates from Intel for the following CPUs.
Users interested in the details of the releases, should be on the look out for KB4346085 for Windows 10 version 1709, KB4346088 for version 1507, KB4346084 for version 1803, KB4346086 for version 1703, and KB4346087 for version 1607.
For those who have not seen them pushed through the Update Settings yet, they can be found at Microsoft’s Update Catalog website here.
It should be noted that not all releases are designed for all devices. For anyone seeking to protect their devices against Spectre and Meltdown threats by installing these updates should make sure to check Microsoft’s recommended microcode specifications or check Intel’s site for more details.
