Microsoft recently released updates to fix the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities in chipsets from Intel, AMD and ARM. Cumulative updates for Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 are available with a fix for the critical security flaw. To protect your Windows PC against Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, Microsoft recommends users to patch the systems by simply installing the latest software update.
“We’re aware of this industry-wide issue and have been working closely with chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations to protect our customers. We are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and have also released security updates to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from Intel, ARM, and AMD. We have not received any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities had been used to attack our customers,” Microsoft said in a statement.
Windows 10 users can navigate to Settings -> Windows Update to install the fix for the vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Windows 8.1 and 7 users need to patch their systems manually since no OTA update is being offered.
Patch Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities on Windows
As we noted above, users are required to install the latest cumulative update in order to patch the security bug. Below you can find the links to download the cumulative updates.
- Windows 10 KB4056892 (Build 16299.192) for Fall Creators Update.
- Windows 10 KB4056891 (Build 15063.850) for Creators Update.
- Windows 10 KB4056890, KB4056888 and KB4056893 for older devices.
- Windows 7 KB4056897 and Windows 8.1 KB4056898.
It’s worth noting that the users are recommended to install the latest cumulative as soon as possible since the devices could be compromised and you can’t tell if someone has hijacked your system.
The patch might fail to install on some Windows PCs due to an issue with some versions of Anti-Virus software. Make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date and compatible with the update. You can, however, set the registry manually to fix compatibility issues with Antivirus software.
- Key=”HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”Subkey=”SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\QualityCompat”
- Value Name=”cadca5fe-87d3-4b96-b7fb-a231484277cc”
- Type=”REG_DWORD”
- Data=”0x00000000”
“During our testing process, we uncovered that some third-party applications have been making unsupported calls into Windows kernel memory that cause stop errors to occur,” Microsoft said in a statement.
If Windows Update reports error 0x80070643 while installing the patch, Microsoft recommends users to verify the installation by navigating to Settings -> System -> About and confirm that Windows 10 has been updated to latest version. This is a known issue where Windows Update incorrectly reports that the update failed to install.
