Protect your Windows devices against Spectre and Meltdown

indianacarnie said:

I guess I was deleting my post as you were replying. I just went back to Intel and got the Intel ME FW Update Tool. It is dated 28Jan18 same as that InSpectre tool. Same result.
Attachment 174605Attachment 174606

you were having a bad day Indi :) 00075 (July) and 00086 (Nov) are both for the ME Firmware Bug , not the Meltdown or Spectre Bugs.

00088 is the Meltdown issue
Intel Product Security Center


you can also try this one I found on Technet it does need the .Net framework installed :
Windows Client Guidance against speculative execution vulnerabilities - Page 11 - Windows 10 Forums

more info on that file and a link to Tech/Net
Windows Client Guidance against speculative execution vulnerabilities - Page 11 - Windows 10 Forums

For discussion. Accurate/Reliable ?

(partial article, full article available by link)

Want to know if your PCs are vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre attacks? Want to get an idea of the sort of performance hit the patches might entail? Want to temporarily disable the update for testing purposes? There's an app that can do all this. Must read: How to tell if your iPhone battery needs replacing


Enter InSpectre, yet another excellent freeware utility created by Steve Gibson of GRC.com.


Using InSpectre is about as simple as it gets -- download the 126KB file (yes, kilobytes, not megabytes!), and on first run (no, there's no installation process) it will give you a clear overview of your system's Meltdown and Spectre status, as well as offering an indication as to whether the patches have an impact on system performance (this is based on the processor/operating system information and not a benchmark).


Q:
On some of the computers, one or the other or both of the Enable/Disable Protection buttons are grayed out and disabled so that they cannot be used. What's going on?
A:
Either of the Protection Enable/Disable buttons will be disabled when the button's respective vulnerability cannot be enabled or disabled by its user. For example, Since AMD processors have never been subject to the Meltdown vulnerability, the Meltdown button will be disabled because there's no way for its protection to be disabled. This would also be true (in the other direction) when a system has an Intel processor and any version of Windows that has not been updated for the Meltdown vulnerability. In that case the system is vulnerable and there's no way for the button to make it invulnerable.

Similarly, any computer whose firmware has not been updated will be vulnerable to Spectre attacks and, again, the button cannot make it invulnerable.

So, InSpectre will enable those buttons when the system's conditions allow the operating system to protect against the respective vulnerability, but the user may wish to disable that protection, where possible.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/meltdow...pc-vulnerable/

HP bios update.

RingTailCoon said:

Gigabyte: nada...

Yes, Gigabyte are slow. Dell updated the BIOS for my 4 year old laptop last week.