Barley 2 weeks into the new year and the first security vulnerability has been brought to the IT communities attention, courtesy of yours truly Microsoft.
So here is the deal: In the beginning of the year, Microsoft rolled out Meltdown and Spectre patches which were suppose to be security updates, that ended up causing some older AMD machines from booting… Fantastic!
What really upsets me about this is they were notified by customers, via their complaints forum’s that the updates were causing these issues. Which means that they did not test these patches before rolling them out to the world!
It’s not the 1st time Microsoft has rolled out updates that have caused issues; last year’s November update caused a clients machine to boot, but when he put the password in it rejected it saying the password was wrong, which it wasn’t. Our tech team had to hack the machine for client to get in.
The update also caused the machine to forget clients Microsoft Office 365 login credentials. We eventually got the problem sorted through Microsoft’s telephone help-desk, which I must say was very helpful.
Back to the recent “meltdown”. In statements released by Microsoft, instead of taking responsibility they pass the buck to the manufacturers of the AMD devices, which you can read about here.
In a more recent statement: Microsoft will now, not roll out any updates to machines which have incompatible third-party anti-virus software, you can read the full statement here.
To make your life easier you can read here, to see if your machine’s AV is compatible with the most recent updates.
Updates are essential to all machines running the Windows Operating system, and anti-virus updates are just as essential because hackers seem to love attacking Microsoft based system’s these whole situation has turned something that was meant to as easy as clicking the update button, into a research and development task before anything can happen, which I must say is very frustrating.
In conclusion, the morel of this story is think before you update, make sure the technology professional is your organization are in tune with the latest vulnerabilities and are skilled enough to overcome a potential “meltdown”.
To have a full IT systems security analysis you can contact Call IT Services on itservices@callitservices.co.za
