To fix Intel’s firmware fiasco, wait for Christmas Eve or 2018
The world’s top PC-makers have started to ship fixes for the multiple flaws in Intel’s CPUs, but plenty won’t land until 2018.
The flaws struck multiple flaws in Intel’s Management Engine, Server Platform Services, and Trusted Execution Engine and make it possible to run code that operating systems – and therefore sysadmins and users – just can’t see.
Intel acknowledged the bugs after Positive Technologies publicised attack vectors for the flaws.
PC-and-server-makers have since rushed to advise of their fixes, but not all have made them available immediately.
Lenovo’s advisory listed seven machines for which the date of fix delivery is “TBD” – to be determined.
That’s a lovely small number compared to Acer, which has given 240 models the TBD treatment.
It’s therefore making Dell look good: it has just 191 TBD PCs. The company has also picked January 7th, 2018, for nine models, January 14th, 2018, for another ten machines and February 2nd, 2018, for four models. Nine machines will get their fix on Christmas Eve, 2017.
Panasonic’s advised that it’s targeted “the end of January 2018” for six machines and said it is “currently confirming” when it will deliver for another seven machines.
Even Intel itself signalled it needs time to fix its NUC, ComputeStick and ComputeCard products. The company said “Expected availability” is in December 2017.
HPE appears to have downloads ready to go, but Fujitsu’s only readied them for Japanese and EMEA customers: the rest of the world has to wait an unspecified amont of time.
Other substantial PC makers have not released advice at the time of writing.
It gets worse: plenty of the affected CPUs were sold to manufacturers of network attached storage or other appliances. If the likes of SuperMicro have announced or released fixes, they’ve eluded The Register‘s searches.
So keep an eye on your emails, and El Reg, sysadmins. There’s plenty more notifications to come and plenty of fixing to be done. ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/23/intel_firmware_fixes_slow_to_arrive/