A WORD OF WARNING: HACKERS ARE RELEASING E-MAILS THAT SAY YOU CAN UPDATE YOUR SYSTEMS BY CLICKING ON A LINK IN THE E-MAIL. DO NOT DO THAT! WE ARE HANDLING THE UPDATES AND THESE E-MAILS ARE TROJANS THAT WILL INFECT YOUR SYSTEMS.
Just a quick note to let you know we are still working the vulnerability issues with Spectre and Meltdown. Remember, Spectre and Meltdown exploit PHYSICAL issues with the way processors are built so it’s not a simple matter of issue a patch and everything is peachy.
This whole mess is still in flux- some vendor fixes have been issued and then recalled, some have worked and others, not so much.
We have a three-step process to work through.
- First, the Antivirus application has to be updated.
- We’re handling both the On Premise (Trend lives on your Server) and the Hosted (lives in the Cloud) versions
- Once that happens, it allows the Operating System to receive a required Registry Patch that helps mitigate the impact of these two bugs
- Several test sites are in work now including our own
- Once this set of fixes is done, we need to apply BIOS updates to each system
- The BIOS is simply an onboard chip that makes sure all the other chips, hard drives, ports and CPU function together
- Some issued BIOS updates have caused systems to stop working altogether or put the system into an unstoppable reboot cycle
- We are holding off on BIOS updates until Dell does a solid confirmation for each type of Workstation and Server currently in use
So, continue to work as usual and we’ll stay on this issue until it’s as resolved as it can be.