Dell, HP and other system manufacturers have advised customers not to install the recent BIOS updates designed to address the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities due to unstable code delivered by Intel.
The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, which allow malicious applications to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access sensitive data, were disclosed on January 3, one week before initially planned. As a result, vendors rushed to roll out patches and many of them turned out to be unstable.
Both software and firmware patches have caused problems. On Monday, Intel told users to stop deploying microcode updates that fix Spectre and Meltdown until it addresses issues that led to reboots and other unpredictable system behavior.
