Meltdown and Spectre – Musato Technologies
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Meltdown and Spectre: Is your PC vulnerable?

A new app gives you a simple overview of your system’s vulnerability status, as well as what kind of performance hit the patches might be having.- Meltdown and SpectreMeltdown and Spectre

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.

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).

InSpectre can also be used to disable protection on PCs (note that enabling and disabling protection requires a reboot)? Why might you want to do that? Well, you might want to do this for testing purposes or to regain lost performance.

Enabling and disabling Meltdown and Spectre protection is carried out by modifying registry entries as detailed here.

InSpectre can also output more in-depth data about the system and how the tool comes to its conclusions about the system’s vulnerability status.

InSpectre can also be run on Linux and macOS systems, but it has to be run using WINE.

Recommended actions -Meltdown and Spectre

Customers must take the following actions to help protect against the vulnerabilities:

Verify that you are running a supported antivirus application before you install the operating system or firmware updates. Contact the antivirus software vendor for compatibility information.

  • Apply all available Windows operating system updates, including the January 2018 Windows security updates.
  • Apply the applicable firmware update that is provided by the device manufacturer.
  • Windows-based computers (physical or virtual) should install the Microsoft security updates that were released on January 3, 2018. See Microsoft Security Advisory ADV180002 for updates for the following versions of Windows.

Contact Musato Technologies today for more information.

Gideon E. M
Author: Gideon E. M

Gideon Ebonde M. is the CEO and Chief Software Architect at Musato Technologies. He is experienced Software developer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He has a strong engineering professional skilled in Mobile Application Development, Enterprise Software, AI, Robotics, IoT, Servers, Cloud and business application. He is an accomplished DevOps software engineer and a visionary computer scientist and engineer.

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