[German]In general, Microsoft’s August 2018 patchday seems to go smoothly with the delivered updates. But there are occasional hints that there may be issues with some updates.
Update KB4456688 for Visual Studio 2015
Update KB4456688 (Description of the security update for the Diagnostic Hub Standard Collector elevation of privilege vulnerability in Visual Studio 2015 Update 3: August 14, 2018) shall mitigate the vulnerability CVE 2018 0952. I am not using VS 2015, so I can’t say anything about it. But at askwoody.com a user has reported the following.
2018 August 18 Microsoft released a security update to Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 to deal with CVE-2018-0952 and CVE-2018-8273. The update can be found in their update catalog under KB4456688.
We’ve applied this update on some canary machines to find out if there is any impact before a general rollout… Unfortunately this security update renders VS2015 virtually unusable – if you try to run your code in debug mode it is super super slow. Don’t know if anyone else has seen this problem. Wanted to let you guys know that MS seems to have botched yet another patch.
In a nutshell: After installing the update, the Visual Studio 2015 installations were virtually unusable on the user’s test machines. Everything is extremely tough. Can anyone confirm that?
Issues with Intel Microcode-Update KB4100347?
On July 24, 2018 Microsoft released several Intel Microcode updates for Windows (see my blog post Intel Microcode Updates KB4100347, KB4090007 (July 2018)). On August 20/21, 2018 there were further Intel Microcode updates released for Windows 10 (see my blog post Intel Microcode Updates KB4346084, KB4346085, KB4346086, KB4346087, KB4346088 (August 20/21, 2018)). Within my German blog, some users commented, that they were also offered Update KB4100347. On Twitter there is a tweet that updates led to system start issues.
I just completely wiped my drive, formated it and installed Windows 10 from scratch.
During installing the updates through windows update everything was okay until KB4100347. Then the same issue occured again and I’m stuck in windows logo screen after reboot for 10 minutes now.— tmGrunty (@tmGrunty) 22. August 2018
The tweet above shows that the user has installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 after the problem occurred. Also in this scenario KB4100347 causes the computer to hang at the Windows logo when booting.
On August 19, 2018, in the blog article Windows 10: Intel driver updates for AMD systems?, I had already raised the question of whether Microsoft incorrectly delivers Intel drivers for AMD systems. MS Power User, who take up the above issue within this article mentioned an article (Microsoft deployment error – Update for Windows 10 version 1803 for x64-based systems (KB4100347)) from an Italian site. The article points out that Microsoft mistakenly rolls out the Intel microcode update KB4100347 on systems with AMD CPUs. All that remains is to uninstall the update and then block the reinstallation (see How to block Windows 10 updates).
Microcode updates: I lost track
I don’t know if I’m alone. When it comes to Intel Microcode updates, I’m slowly losing track of things. There are firmware updates and there are Windows updates that are used when booting Windows. Depending on the machine, certain registry entries must then be set in order for the microcode updates to take effect under Windows Server (see article Windows Server guidance to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities).
And the bottom line for every user is: Are the Spectre gaps the big security problem, or is malware not aimed at other vulnerabilities? Susan Bradley took up this question on askwoody.com in the blog entry Patch Lady – Microcode confusion and concludes that everything is not that simple. At ComputerWorld you will find further information about (minor) issues caused by August 2018 Patchday.
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Intel Microcode Updates KB4346084, KB4346085, KB4346086, KB4346087, KB4346088 (August 20/21, 2018))