Latest Antivirus Product Comparison Testing Roundup Sept 2018

SE Labs tests security products that are designed to protect your computer systems and mobile devices.

Get review of Antivirus Products for Sept 2018 here. 

Get it Spectre / Meltdown BIOS fix for older processors Windows 8, 7 and XP

Intel fixed the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities allow speculative execution side-channel attacks, specifically CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5754 but only for modern CPUs.  Essentially CPUs sold running with Windows 10 pre-installed on the machines, leaving a larger part of CPUs unsupported. 

Check Intel's official support page for CPUs fixed. 

Not to be detered Eran "Regeneration" Badit created the Intel Microcode Boot Loader, which fixes this but in a round-about perhaps uncomfortable way, you have have plugged in a USB stick with the fix every time you boot the computer.

The tool will use the Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) and the Syslinux bootloader to automatically detect and apply the most current microcodes for an Intel processor.  This allows computer using old processors to become protected.

See Intel Microcode Boot Loader official post for instructions to install.

The current release includes the latest ucodes for 392 Intel CPUs produced from 1996 to 2018.

Sysinternals Procdump Now Available on Linux

ProcDump is a command-line utility whose primary purpose is monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generating crash dumps during a spike that an administrator or developer can use to determine the cause of the spike. ProcDump also includes hung window monitoring (using the same definition of a window hang that Windows and Task Manager use), unhandled exception monitoring and can generate dumps based on the values of system performance counters. It also can serve as a general process dump utility that you can embed in other scripts. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procdump

Download ProcDump for Linux (GitHub)

Below is a video episode of Defrag Tools, Andrew Richards and Larry Larsen walk you through Sysinternals ProcDump. ProcDump allows you to capture the memory of a process running on the computer. The dump file can be of varying size and can be taken with varying outage durations. Dumps can be triggered immediately or can be triggered by a variety of events including CPU utilization, Memory utilization, a Performance Counter, a Hung Window and/or Native/Managed exceptions.