Prepare for Y2K style Meltdown strategy
Summary
Towards the end of January 2018, Intel was forced to admit its patch for the Spectre and Meltdown processor bug was flawed and could cause PCs and servers to lock up.“Intel recently had to recommend that organisations halt their deployments of firmware, due to sporadic processor reboots, and Microsoft provided a new switch to disable the unstable microcode updates.”“On servers, an administrative insider or compromised account with rights to execute code on the system may launch an attack to steal secrets,” said McDonald.The patches offer some level of protection against Spectre/Meltdown, but according to Dynatrace, companies will have to make heavy sacrifices in terms of performance, which can increase central processing unit consumption by up to 50%, depending on their IT environment.From a best practice perspective, Gartner has suggested IT departments patch one server in a group of similar systems to check incompatibility issues and measure the performance impact.