Patch/Configuration Management, Vulnerability Management

Intel advises companies to stop installing Spectre/Meltdown update

Intel is recommending that vendors and end users stop deploying the current version of its patch designed to fix the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities that were discovered in most of the company's processors, along with some from AMD and ARM, and wait for a new patch to be finalized.

The company said it has identified the root cause of the problem in its Broadwell and Haswell processor lines and is in the process of testing an early version of an updated patch to some industry partners, said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel, in a company blog. When testing is completed a final version will be released.

“We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior,” he wrote.

A list of all the platforms affected are here.

More details on the patch are scheduled to be released laster this week, Shenoy wrote.

Patching the Spectre/Meltdown flaws has proven problematical. On January 9 Microsoft stopped rolling out patches as they were causing some AMD-powered computers to suffer a blue screen of death

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