Microsoft’s free analytics service sniffs out Meltdown, Spectre patch status

Microsoft’s free Windows Analytics service now scans enterprise Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 PCs, and reports whether they’ve been updated to defend against potential attacks exploiting the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities.

The new capabilities of Windows Analytics’ “Upgrade Readiness” were announced Tuesday by Terry Myerson, the top Windows executive at the company. Myerson called the vulnerabilities – found by Google security researchers and reported to vendors in mid-2017 – “a new challenge for all of us” because they were in the silicon, not in software.

“We have added new capabilities to our free Windows Analytics service to report the status for all the Windows devices that [IT professionals] manage,” Myerson wrote in a post to a company blog.

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