Frequently Asked Questions on Meltdown/Spectre and Microsoft Security Advisor ADV180002

As part of the planned tests, Panda Security has confirmed that the security patch of Microsoft in relation to Security Advisor ADV18002 is, in principle, compatible with the different operating systems certified for the Panda Security antivirus products.

However, despite the fact that no problems have been detected during the tests, we cannot guarantee that issues may not arise after applying the Microsoft patch. For this reason, it is recommended to perform validation tests in your environment to ensure their compatibility, just like it would happen with any other Microsoft patch.

Panda Security is fully committed to its customers and following Microsoft's recommendations, has deployed the requested registry key. If you are a Panda Security customer and do not have the key in your computer's registry, you could be in the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: Operating System not applicable

Panda Security has included the registry key in the operating systems indicated by Microsoft, that is, Windows 7 and higher for endpoints and Windows 2008 R2 and higher for servers.
Scenario 2: Product not applicable

Panda Security has included the registry key in the corporate antivirus products Adaptive Defense 360, Endpoint Protection Plus and Endpoint Protection as well as in the Consumer products. In the case of Adaptive Defense, since it is an EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) solution and coexists with a traditional antivirus, it is for the antivirus provider to insert the registry entry after their compatibility tests have been passed. In any case, Panda Security, has also carried out sanity tests to verify that the Adaptive Defense software does not interfere with the Microsoft patch.
Scenario 3: I have the product and operating system the patch applies to, but the Microsoft registry key has not been included on one or several computers of my network.

Below we describe the most common situations:
- Situation 1: The registry key is not present in none of the network computers
  
  The inclusion of the registry key is performed by an executable downloaded from the Panda servers. Check that you do not have any type of security rule to block the download of compressed files (RAR format).
- Situation 2: The registry key is not present in a single computer or in a small number of computers
  
  Check through Panda's management console if the last connection date of the affected machine is current:
  
  If the date is current, check that the version of your protection is 7.65 or higher, as these are the current operative versions of our corporate solutions and they have been certified with the Microsoft patch as well. Otherwise, update the version of the protection by ensuring that the computer or computers are within a profile with the automatic updates of the protection engine enabled.
  
  Otherwise, that is, if the connection is recent and the version is updated, download the Panda Support Information tool and send the resulting file to Support. Please follow the below instructions to do so:
  1. From a computer with an Internet connection, download and save the Panda Support Information tool.
  2. Run the file as administrator, follow the wizard, fill in the required fields, tick the Do not send, save local box and press the Start button. The tool will automatically detect the customer number.
  3. A message will be displayed indicating that data collection has begun.
  4. When the data collection is finished, a message will indicate the path where the file has been saved with the following format: NAMEOFCOMPUTER_ [DATE-TIME] _PSInfo.7z
  5. Send the generated file to Support.