Intel says patch to counter Spectre and Meltdown is buggy, users advised to refrain from updating

Intel has identified the root cause of reboots and undesirable behaviour in Intel powered system and has asked customers not to update the available security patch.

Redmi 4 (Gold, 32GB)... 8499

If you are being careful and updating your Intel powered PC in order to safeguard yourself from Spectre and Meltdown bugs, well halt right now. Intel has released a new advisory stating that there is an issue with the in the security patch being seeded to customers and has recommended not to install them just now.

The company has put out a statement saying, “We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors and end users stop deployment of current versions, as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior”.

In its blog post, the company has asked industry partners such as OEM hardware makers and laptop vendors to focus their efforts on testing the early version Intel has made available. This will allow them to push the release faster. The company said that it will add more details by the end of the week. Via the blog post Intel’s Executive Vice President, Navin Shenoy said, “I apologize for any disruption this change in guidance may cause. The security of our products is critical for Intel, our customers, and partners, and for me, personally. I assure you we are working around the clock to ensure we are addressing these issues”.

It was initially believed that there was a reboot problem with Intel’s older and Broadwell and Haswell processors, along with some AMD chips. However, last week Intel admitted that the problem was not limited to older processors and even some Kaby Lake based systems are unable to reboot. This is a yet another issue which has cropped up after the slowdown issue which came to light after the initial updates.

If you are not aware just yet, Spectre and Meltdown are the biggest known security bugs which affect all major chipsets (PC and mobile processors) alike. While the Meltdown bug is limited to Intel only, the Spectre bug is much worse and more complicated and affects almost every piece of hardware which uses a microprocessor made in the last five years.