TrendLabs: Understanding Meltdown and Spectre

Solutions and best practices

Users have no way to mitigate this threat; the responsibility of doing so ultimately falls on vendors who have released multiple patches to mitigate Meltdown. Microsoft has released documents that cover both server and client versions of Windows:

• Windows Server guidance to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities
• Windows Client Guidance for IT Pros to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities

Note that in order to receive automatic updates from Microsoft, a registry key must be in place on the affected system. Details can be found in this article.

Apple’s December updates for macOS (released last December 2017) already resolved this vulnerability as well. As noted earlier, patches for Meltdown have been merged into the Linux kernel. It is up to individual vendors to release this update for their distribution; some vendors such as Debian, Red Hat, and SUSE have released bulletins and patches as appropriate.

REF: http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/speculation-risky-understanding-meltdown-spectre/