ADV180002 - Microsoft Security Update 3 January 20

Considering that severe design flaws present in the modern CPUs have been officially disclosed and recognized, it was only natural that Microsoft takes action to protect Windows users. Even though there have not been any attacks confirmed, so far they are known to take advantage of three main vulnerabilities, namely CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5753 and  CVE-2017-5754.

Known as Spectre and Meltdown for the general public, the idea behind these exploits is to infiltrate your system and leak sensitive information that could be used for further exploitation of the computer. Because they can read data directly from memory, it means that third-parties could have access to your passwords, documents and private chats without a real effort.

While they are still working on a fix for the vulnerabilities Spectre can exploit, users are highly advised to install the ADV180002 updates so that they protect themselves against Meltdown. It is worth mentioning that the best protection, for the time being, is to keep your computer up to date. This can be achieved by either turning on the automatic updates on the operating system or downloading the patch corresponding to your current architecture and installing them manually.

It is worth mentioning that Microsoft admits that the security patches can have a noticeable impact on the performance of the computers. Nonetheless, the performance decrease can vary depending on the hardware generation as well as the chip manufacturer.