Microsoft issued an emergency fix for the recently discovered Meltdown vulnerability found in Intel CPUs, but warn that it may cause compatibility problems with some AV tools.
Redmond issued the Windows 10 update earlier this week despite the monthly update coming up next Tuesday.
Despite the fix, Microsoft warned in an advisory that it was incompatible with a “small number” of AV products, claiming,” The compatibility issue is caused when anti-virus applications make unsupported calls into Windows kernel memory. These calls may cause stop errors (also known as blue screen errors) that make the device unable to boot. To help prevent stop errors caused by incompatible anti-virus applications, Microsoft is only offering the Windows security updates released on January 3, 2018 to devices running anti-virus software from partners who have confirmed their software is compatible with the January 2018 Windows operating system security update.
Users who’re affected can take advantage of built-in anti-virus protection, Windows Defender for Microsoft 10 devices or Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows 7 devices.
The advisory also contains the registry key AV vendors need to set in order for their customers to receive the updates.
Customers running earlier versions of Windows can expect a fix from Microsoft in next Tuesdays Upgrade release, and the firm is also “in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services.”
Microsoft is just one of several firms scrambling to issue fixes to help protect customer’s sensitive information from the critical Meltdown vulnerability. The Meltdown vulnerability “melts” the security boundaries normally enforced at the chip level to allow normal applications to read the contents of private kernel memory.
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