Microsoft's emergency fixes for the Meltdown CPU vulnerability in early 2018 inadvertently introduced a far more dangerous weakness on 64‑bit installations of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 — a bug that made kernel page tables accessible to unprivileged code and allowed trivial, high‑speed...
It’s never a good thing when a security patch meant to protect users instead leaves some machines unbootable — that’s exactly what happened after Microsoft’s January 2018 Windows updates designed to mitigate the Meltdown and Spectre speculative-execution vulnerabilities caused a subset of...