What better than a vulnerability that affect almost everything to start the new year ! We’ll start to work hard this year since this vulnerability needs you to patch the hardware, the OS (clients and servers), mobile devices, hypervisor, cloud machines, etc.. I don’t know about other cloud provider but i can say that Microsoft were pretty fast on patching Azure hardware and hypervisor. First we need to look how huge is the performance impact, specially on database and hypervisor servers.
There’s also a Powershell module to test your system ! Just run a elevated Powershell and install the module :
Install-Module SpeculationControl
Get-SpeculationControlSettings
After Microsoft patch and reboot i got
The Microsoft update is already available on Windows Update (prior to patch tuesday)
In order to have Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is enabled : True you need to update the Bios with latest patch
After Bios update of tablet manufacturer
On an older machine I got
Now interesting to see how fast my motherboard manufacturer will be since it’s a 2012 motherboard..
So Suits Up and get to work!