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Businesses cautious in installing patches to fix chip flaw

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There are 2 major security bugs:

Spectre - affects Intel, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm chips in varying degrees - hardware harder to fix (if even possible, nobody knows yet) but also harder to exploit - fixes for this will take awhile

Meltdown - affects Intel CPUs made year 1995 till present - hardware fix on future Intel CPUs - software patches for this already being implemented by companies

Motherboard BIOS and drivers need to be updated from manufacturers or vendors websites

Here’s a quick checklist:

Keep antivirus up-to-date

Update operating system

Update web browser

Check for firmware updates

Win10 patch already out, but Win7/8 update not till monthly Patch Tuesday this week, but security updates for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, and Server operating systems are available on the Microsoft Update Catalog website now:

https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=windows+security+update+2018

But before rushing to install the patch, users and admins should note one important issue: the fix may not yet be compatible with your antivirus software.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/important-january-3-2018-windows-security-updates-and-antivirus-softwa

Check the following link below for a table of supported and not supported AV products – obviously, if there is no support, don't apply the Windows patch yet

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLpzAtckQxYiuirADzf3cL42FQ/htmlview?sle=true#gid=0

Users and admins who are comfortable editing Registry keys themselves can manually perform the task by setting the following:

Key="HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" Subkey="SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\QualityCompat" Value Name="cadca5fe-87d3-4b96-b7fb-a231484277cc" Type="REG_DWORD” Data="0x00000000”

Casual desktop users and gamers shouldn't notice any difference, although servers running non-CPU-bound intensive workloads – such as anything that hammers disk storage, the network or just makes a lot of system calls – will suffer to some degree with the Meltdown patch applied. YMMV

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