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Microsoft's Windows 7 Meltdown Fixes From January and February Made PCs More Insecure (theregister.co.uk)
Microsoft's January and February security fixes for Intel's Meltdown processor vulnerability opened up an even worse security hole on Windows 7 PCs and Server 2008 R2 boxes. From a report: This is according to researcher Ulf Frisk, who previously found glaring shortcomings in Apple's FileVault disk encryption system. We're told Redmond's early Meltdown fixes for 64-bit Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 left a crucial kernel memory table readable and writable for normal user processes. This, in turn, means any malware on those vulnerable machines, or any logged-in user, can manipulate the operating system's memory map, gain administrator-level privileges, and extract and modify any information in RAM. The Meltdown chip-level bug allows malicious software, or unscrupulous logged-in users, on a modern Intel-powered machine to read passwords, personal information, and other secrets from protected kernel memory. But the security fixes from Microsoft for the bug, on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, issued in January and February, ended up granting normal programs read and write access to all of physical memory.
When Meltdown and Spectre were first revealed, I know I posted on here: PLEASE MAKE FIXES OPTIONAL.
Mainly because these 'flaws,' and I do use that word loosely. I'm not entirely convinced it's an actual flaw. It's just how it works. Anyway, gimping the execution predicting to protect against these 'flaws' is really stupid on a desktop computer, where there's no VM's, very little if any usage outside of 1 user. They're hurting computing performance for a non-issue.
On server systems, data center, etc, yes, fix this bug, it's a real issue on shared computing resources. On a desktop where there's 1 maybe 2 users whom browse the web, play games, type documents and otherwise 'use' their computer normally, it should be left as is. It's not a flaw on desktops. The flaw is fixing this on desktop, because it gimps performance.
All that aside, Microsoft making it worse it just laughable. And pretty much non-surprising. I'd wager Microsoft is one of the few companies that could take a 'problem' with fairly straight forward fixes and fuck it up, making a bigger problem than originally existed. Par for the course, for Microsoft.