Yesterday's Patch Tuesday release included fixes for the latest Spectre vulnerability, known as Spectre variant 4, or
SpectreNG.
These patches are currently not available for all Windows versions, though, and all mitigations are disabled by default.
Only Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 have received SpectreNG patches.
Meltdown and Spectre patching is a mess
Furthermore, because of a constant stream of Meltdown and Spectre patching that has been going on for the last six months, it's been getting harder and harder for users to keep track of what patches they've received, what patch needs manual intervention, and which ones cause issues.
To help system administrators with these confusing issues, Microsoft has published a table yesterday that contains the status of each of the Meltdown and Spectre patches it released since January 3, this year.
Readers are advised that the table assumes they are running a Windows version with all the security patches installed and up to date, including yesterday's June 2018 Patch Tuesday updates train.
If you're running an OS version where patches are disabled by default, the user must visit the linked KB article for additional information on how to enable the associated mitigation, if the user deems it necessary and in his threat model.
