Faronics Antivirus and Microsoft updates from January 3, 2018 (Spectre / Meltdown)

Microsoft has released a patch on January 3rd 2018 to implement mitigation steps for the vulnerabilities described in CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715, and CVE-2017-5754 (otherwise known as the Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities).

This update patch implemented a check that required a specific registry key to be set by Antivirus Vendors to ensure that issues would not occur due to the interaction between the antivirus software and the January 3rd patches. Faronics has completed testing and has released a utility to quickly set this registry key on client machines.

This patch can be downloaded here.

This utility will need to be executed on the client machine and can be pushed and launched through the Faronics Core Console, Deep Freeze Enterprise Console, or any other 3rd party management tool. This utility will need to be run while Deep Freeze (if installed) is in a Thawed state so that the update can be retained on the client workstation. Once complete administrators can run Windows Updates through the scheduled workstation tasks in Deep Freeze, or through the "Run Windows Updates" feature of the Enterprise Console.

Deep Freeze cloud customers will see changes rolled out to the client machines through the Deep Freeze Cloud Agent to automatically set this value on protected machines. This change is rolling out as of January 9th, 2017 and will be applied the next time that the system boots, and is in a thawed state (if Deep Freeze is installed).