ESET advises customers on how to avoid spectre, meltdown vulnerabilities

ESET said it recently learned about vulnerabilities called Spectre and Meltdown that affect many modern processors.ESET is one of the few third-party security solutions already compatible with Microsoft’s emergency patches (released January 3rd, 2018) that fix these vulnerabilities.

Few days into 2018, ESET released Antivirus and antispyware scanner module 1533.3 for all consumer and business users.This update marks the system as compatible to download important security patches by Microsoft.

Tweeting about the advisory, Mr. Olufemi Ake, country manager of ESET (Nigeria), confirmed that the country discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, published on January 3, 2018, caused by side-effects of optimization techniques designed to increase the performance of modern processors.

These techniques are called “out-of-order” and “speculative” execution. They allow the processor to make better use of time it would have to spend waiting unnecessarily before executing the next instruction to pre-compute further results which may or may not be used in the execution flow.

These pre-computed results, if not used, are discarded, but, as researchers have shown, there are side-effects left by such precomputation which are not disposed of thoroughly enough and can sometimes be leaked to the potential attacker.As stated by the authors of the papers describing the vulnerabilities, there are theoretical ways antivirus could detect the problem.

However, detection would have an extremely negative impact on the device’s performance and significantly influence user experience; it would be a less effective approach than prevention.

“Therefore, we recommend that ESET users keep track of any related patches for their systems and apply them as soon as possible”.

He said that ESET has solutions to tackle such vulnerabilities.

“While testing the patch on Windows operating systems, Microsoft determined that some third-party applications have been making unsupported calls to Windows kernel memory. These calls have caused stop errors (also known as BSODs).

“These calls may cause stop errors that make the device unable to boot. To help prevent stop errors caused by incompatible antivirus 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”, the Company confirmed.