ComputerWorld

On the heels of the Jan. 17 release of 14 Windows and .NET patches, we now have a huge crop of new patches, revised older patches, warnings about bugs, and a bewildered ecosystem of Microsoft customers who can’t figure out what in the blue blazes is going on.

Let’s step through the, uh, offerings on Jan. 18.

Windows 10 patches

Win10 Fall Creators Update version 1709 — Cumulative update KB 4073291 brings the Meltdown/Spectre patches to 32-bit machines. What, you thought 32-bit machines already had Meltdown/Spectre patches? Silly mortal. Microsoft’s Security Advisory ADV180002 has the dirty details in the fine print, point 7:

To read this article in full, please click here

Never give a sucker an even break. Yesterday, on a very out-of-band Wednesday, Microsoft released preview patches for Windows 8.1 (but not 7!), Server 2012, and Windows 10 1709 (for bricked AMD machines only), with preview cumulative updates for Win10 1703 and 1607. There are also nine different .NET preview patches.

What should you do? Nothing. More accurately, make sure you DON’T install any of them. Fortunately, all of these patches require that you download and install them — and you’d have to be crazy (or an admin trying to shore up some critical servers) to dive into the cesspool.

It’s the same advice I’ve been giving all month. There’s nothing here that you need right now — there are no known exploits for Meltdown or Spectre in the wild, in particular — and machines are dropping like flies.

To read this article in full, please click here

I’ve seen a lot of bizarre Microsoft patches-of-patches, but the new patches for AMD processors are in a world of their own. The security-only, manually downloadable patches appear to be Meltdown/Spectre patches for machines that were bricked by other bad patches, earlier this month, but they’ve arrived with no instructions — and a strange circular logic.

Last week, Microsoft released two patches, with these official titles:

• KB 4073578: Unbootable state for AMD devices in Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• KB 4073576: Unbootable state for AMD devices in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2

The Win7 KB article says:

To read this article in full, please click here

The Windows emergency security updates issued by Microsoft earlier this month came with an unprecedented prerequisite – a new key stored in the operating system’s registry – that antivirus vendors were told to generate after they’d guaranteed their code wouldn’t trigger dreaded Blue Screens of Death (BSoD) when users apply the patches.

The demands confused customers, and fueled a flood of support documents and an avalanche of web content. Those who heard about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities struggled to figure out whether their PCs were protected, and if not, why not. Millions more, not having gotten wind of the potential threat, carried on without realizing that their PCs might be barred from receiving several months’ worth of security updates.

To read this article in full, please click here