How to check if your PC is protected from the Meltdown and Spectre exploits

Here are the steps to determine if your Windows 10 PC is still vulnerable to the Meltdown and Spectre exploits, and we'll also tell you what to do if you're not protected.

A number of security researchers have recently disclosed two vulnerabilities ("Meltdown" and "Spectre") found in many modern processors. These are major hardware design flaws that attackers can exploit to access part of the memory that should remain private allowing them to steal your information (passwords, emails, browser history, and photos).

These flaws affect a large number of processors released in the past two decades, including those manufactured by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and ARM — but it's still primarily an Intel problem. AMD has published a statement clarifying that one (branch target injection) of the two Spectre variants doesn't impact its processors, and the second variant (bounds check bypass) can be resolved through a software update. The third variant, Meltdown (rogue data cache load), doesn't impact AMD chips either due to architecture differences.

In addition, as a result of these two now famous security flaws, supported OSes, such as Windows 10, macOS, Linux, as well as many other pieces of software, are also compromised.

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