Meltdown and Spectre

Question

We were just recently notified about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability.

We have a 3rd party AV and it does show the vulnerability with most of our servers , all Windows 2012 and 2016 but all Windows 2019 servers are ok.

Even though the systems are all patched and they all have the registry key required for Microsoft to allow patches for this vulnerability, the AV still shows

that the vulnerability still exists.

I would appreciated it very much if someone can give me some recommendations on fixing these issues with the VM's and ESXi Hosts.

We are a virtualized shop using VmWare and Dell EMC VxRail.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Hi @Dan ,

If you have followed all the steps mentioned in the article below from Microsoft on how to protect your Windows devices against the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, then you should be good. There are still some false positives with scanning software or antivirus/antimalware software that still complains about the vulnerability although the systems are patched fully.

Protect your Windows devices against speculative execution side-channel attacks
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/protect-your-windows-devices-against-speculative-execution-side-channel-attacks-a0b9f66c-f426-d854-fdbb-0e6beaeeee87

If you have followed all the required steps, I would perhaps contact your antivirus provider and check with them closer.

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Best regards,
Leon