Microsoft earlier today began rolling out new cumulative updates to Windows 10 operating system with improvements and bug fixes. It appears that the software giant has also rolled additional security updates for Windows 10 operating system on 32-bit devices.
While the changelog of the update on Microsoft’s support page only details the improvements, the company has also rolled out security updates to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities disclosed in early January. In an update to ADV180002 (Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities), the company has detailed some improvements.
These additional security patches are only available for select versions of Windows 10 including the latest version 1703, 1607 and 1511. It’s worth noting these extra mitigation is only available for 32-bit versions of the operating systems, apparently because it wasn’t necessary to mitigate the 64-bit versions.
“Microsoft continues to work to provide 32-bit (x86) protections for other supported Windows versions but does not have a release schedule at this time. These update will be included in subsequent updates, and do not apply to x64 (64-bit) systems,” Microsoft explained.
Earlier this month, Intel announced new updates for the Spectre vulnerability that would fix the vulnerability without affecting the performance of the systems. “We expect to do the same for more platforms in the coming days. We also continue to release beta microcode updates so that customers and partners have the opportunity to conduct extensive testing before we move them into production,” the company said.
