The world is talking about the two new vulnerabilities – Meltdown and Spectre. Both of them have something to do the way the various processors handle the data. Many of the processors manufactured by Intel, AMD and ARM are affected by these two vulnerabilities. Operating system companies like Microsoft and Apple have released software that can patch your system against them. Open-source community has also stepped up and provided the patches for operating systems like Linux. The processor manufacturers like Intel and AMD have also released advisories and in future will release patches.
If you are a Windows PC user and have installed January 2018 security updates in your PC, then your computer should be protected against these vulnerabilities effectively. But how would you know if your system is patched against them. You can use the SpecuCheck tool to find out the mitigation status of the software mitigations against CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) and hardware mitigations against CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre).
You simply have to download this tool and run it in your Windows PC. It will instantly display the status of mitigation in your computer. The status displayed could be yes or no. But the status displayed in the green color is good and the one displayed in the red color indicates no mitigation for that type of attack.
Even though all Windows users using Windows 7 SP1 and above are going to receive the updates automatically, you can also download the updates manually from https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/ADV180002 and install them in your Windows PC yourself. Installing the Windows updates won’t be enough for complete protection against these new vulnerabilities. You will have to install the firmware updates released by the chip manufacturers in the near future. None of the chip manufacturers have released any such updates as of now, but you should keep an eye on the future developments by frequently visiting https://meltdownattack.com/.
You can download the SpecuCheck tool from https://github.com/ionescu007/SpecuCheck/releases.