As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, everyone's suddenly talking about working from home, but many smaller businesses don't have the facilities or policies for this already set up. It's important that businesses take an intelligent, considered approach to this and don't just give their staff unfettered access to the work network - cyber criminals are watching closely to take advantage of businesses allowing remote access haphazardly, so those that aren't careful could go from a remote workforce business to no business in short order.

On April 14 Intel disclosed their architectural vulnerability to a new group of side channel attacks collectively called MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling). Intel have provided microcode updates to their manufacturing partners for firmware updates, as well as to Microsoft, Linux and other OS developers for integration in future software patches.

We still get asked this question frequently. In simple terms, virtualisation is taking your existing physical computers and making a ‘software’ copy of them. This is quite easy, because all the configured, important parts of your servers are already software anyway – the operating system itself, the programs you run, and the data you’re storing. Virtualisation platforms have a standard (identical) software version of the computer ‘hardware’ for all the virtual computers to run on top of – think of it like every computer in the world having identical hardwareSEE DETAILS

The vast majority of products greater than two years old don't have firmware patches available on the manufacturers' support websites. In reaching out to Gigabyte support to determine if they did, in fact, have firmware available for a particular model, we were then provided with the file. When we asked why they have firmware available that isn't being published on the product's support page, they responded with this disturbing revelation: At present, we provide bios with Intel's Spectre microcode updated for old models by customers request.

Following up from our recent article on the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, we’ve had confirmation from Gigabyte that Award BIOS motherboard products cannot apply the Intel CPU microcode that patches the Spectre flaws. According to them this affects all Award BIOS products from all manufacturers. In that case, even though the CPUs may be supported by Intel, the platform itself is not, so there’s no way to apply the CPU microcode and protect that system from Spectre. There’s a possibility that Microsoft may release a future patch that includes theSEE DETAILS