To correct the Specter vulnerability in its second variant, AMD has released a special microcode update, which has been detailed on its security blog.

As soon as the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities were discovered and it was announced that AMD also suffered from some variants of Specter, the company quickly came out to say that it was false that they suffered from these vulnerabilities. Time has shown that they do affect them. The company, through its security blog, in a text by Mark Papermaster, announces the launch of the first patches and solutions to mitigate the problems that affect its processors, in relation to Specter exploits.

The blog post clarifies that the exploits based on Specter version 1 (GPZ1 - Google Project Zero Flaw 1), have already been fixed by the company's partners. The company reiterates that the Meltdown (GPZ3) vulnerabilities do not affect them (it seems that they only affect Intel) and that the patches that they are launching at the moment are for the GPZ2 variant of Specter.

To correct this variant of Specter, an update of the microcode of the processors is required by the developers of the equipment and manufacturers of the different motherboards, in addition to also requiring a completely updated version of Windows, so that everything works in the right way. Those who have Linux, should know that the parts for Specter in its second variation, have already been made available to the developers of the different Linux distributions and that they would have been released so far this year.

From AMD they recognize that the variation 2 of Specter is very complicated to patch, but they wanted to emphasize that, despite being complicated, they have worked with their partners to offer the best possible solution to this problem. These patches are a 'combination of operating system patches and microcode updates to AMD processors to further mitigate risk'