Microsoft on Tuesday released 14 security updates, including fixes for the Spectre and Meltdown flaws detailed last week, as well as a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Officethat is being exploited in the wild. Separately, Adobe pushed a security update to its Flash Player software.
Last week’s story, Scary Chip Flaws Raise Spectre of Meltdown, sought to explain the gravity of these two security flaws present in most modern computers, smartphones, tablets and mobile devices. The bugs are thought to be mainly exploitable in chips made by Inteland ARM, but researchers said it was possible they also could be leveraged to steal data from computers with chips made by AMD.
By the time that story had published, Microsoft had already begun shipping an emergency update to address the flaws, but many readers complained that their PCs experienced the dreaded “blue screen of death” (BSOD) after applying the update. Microsoft warned that the BSOD problems were attributable to many antivirus programs not yet updating their software to play nice with the security updates.