We have seen quite a lot of security issues affecting PCs and the latest one to come is the Intel Meltdown flaw. Meltdown is a hardware vulnerability which will be affecting Intel x86 and also few ARM-based processor. The issue with the flaw it that it allows a rogue process to read any physical, kernel or other process’s mapped memory, regardless of whether or not it should be able to do so. So how do you check if your PC is at risk for Intel Meltdown flaw?
Intel has released a tool to check if your PC is affected by Meltdown or Intel-SA-00086.
Once you run the tool, it performs an analysis on your PC to see if your PC is affected. If the INTEL-SA-00086 Detection Tool reported your system is vulnerable, please check with your system manufacturer for updated firmware.
Affected products:
- 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th Generation Intel Core Processor Family
- Intel Xeon Processor E3-1200 v5 & v6 Product Family
- Intel Xeon rocessor Scalable Family
- Intel Xeon Processor W Family
- Intel Pentium Processor G Series
- Intel Atom C3000 Processor Family
- Apollo Lake Intel Atom Processor E3900 series
- Apollo Lake Intel Pentium
- Celeron G, N and J series Processors
More details can be found here.
Download Meltdown Detection tool
Yep! My Core i5 is vulnerable. However, I will have to install a malicious program to get affected by this right? I mean, it’s not like the SMB exploit where you could get infected by someone else on the same network out of nowhere right?
Yes, it is only a security exploit, as of now there is no major risk unless some malicious program intended for this exploit is around.
Is this tool even really necessary? It looks like basically every Intel processor is affected. If you have any Intel processor it seems safe to assume you’re affected.
Thank god, my system seems to be safe. Thanks for the tool 🙂