Microsoft joins forces with Intel to beat Spectre

By Darren Allan

In a fresh move to further shore up security, Microsoft is providing Intel’s Spectre fix for PCs with Skylake processors running Windows 10 – with further patches to be delivered for older generation CPUs in the future.

Of course, Intel is already pushing out Spectre (and Meltdown) patches itself, with numerous processor families seeing microcode updates released in the past few weeks; but Intel doesn’t supply these directly to end users.

Rather, they’re given to hardware manufacturers, who must subsequently incorporate these fixes into their firmware updates, test them, then release them to the actual consumer. In the case of some smaller manufacturers, that process could take some time, so what Microsoft is effectively doing here is offering another route to protect yourself.

If you haven’t got the patch through from your hardware vendor, then you can grab it directly from Microsoft instead. The current caveat is you need to be running the latest version of Windows 10 (Fall Creators Update), in which case you can snag the first patch – which covers ‘some’ Skylake devices – from the Microsoft Update Catalog (it’s update KB4090007).

Microsoft doesn’t specify exactly which Skylake PCs will be able to apply the update currently, but …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components