I followed a tutorial to to check to see if my Linux Mint 18.3 laptop was successfully patched against Spectre & Meltdown, This is my results ~


rick@rick-LIFEBOOK-AH530-HD6 ~ $ cd /tmp/
rick@rick-LIFEBOOK-AH530-HD6 /tmp $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sp...own-checker.sh
--2018-01-28 12:05:16-- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sp...own-checker.sh
Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 151.101.16.133
Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|151.101.16.133|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 57304 (56K) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘spectre-meltdown-checker.sh’

spectre-meltdown-ch 100%[===================>] 55.96K --.-KB/s in 0.05s

2018-01-28 12:05:17 (1.19 MB/s) - ‘spectre-meltdown-checker.sh’ saved [57304/57304]

rick@rick-LIFEBOOK-AH530-HD6 /tmp $ sudo sh spectre-meltdown-checker.sh
[sudo] password for rick:
Spectre and Meltdown mitigation detection tool v0.33

Checking for vulnerabilities on current system
Kernel is Linux 4.13.0-31-generic #34~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 19 17:11:01 UTC 2018 x86_64
CPU is Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 460 @ 2.53GHz

Hardware check
* Hardware support (CPU microcode) for mitigation techniques
* Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS)
* SPEC_CTRL MSR is available: NO
* CPU indicates IBRS capability: NO
* Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB)
* PRED_CMD MSR is available: NO
* CPU indicates IBPB capability: NO
* Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP)
* SPEC_CTRL MSR is available: NO
* CPU indicates STIBP capability: NO
* Enhanced IBRS (IBRS_ALL)
* CPU indicates ARCH_CAPABILITIES MSR availability: NO
* ARCH_CAPABILITIES MSR advertises IBRS_ALL capability: NO
* CPU explicitly indicates not being vulnerable to Meltdown (RDCL_NO): NO
* CPU microcode is known to cause stability problems: NO
* CPU vulnerability to the three speculative execution attacks variants
* Vulnerable to Variant 1: YES
* Vulnerable to Variant 2: YES
* Vulnerable to Variant 3: YES

CVE-2017-5753 [bounds check bypass] aka 'Spectre Variant 1'
* Checking count of LFENCE opcodes in kernel: YES
> STATUS: NOT VULNERABLE (114 opcodes found, which is >= 70, heuristic to be improved when official patches become available)

CVE-2017-5715 [branch target injection] aka 'Spectre Variant 2'
* Mitigation 1
* Kernel is compiled with IBRS/IBPB support: YES
* Currently enabled features
* IBRS enabled for Kernel space: NO (echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/ibrs_enabled)
* IBRS enabled for User space: NO (echo 2 > /proc/sys/kernel/ibrs_enabled)
* IBPB enabled: NO (echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/ibpb_enabled)
* Mitigation 2
* Kernel compiled with retpoline option: NO
* Kernel compiled with a retpoline-aware compiler: NO
* Retpoline enabled: NO
> STATUS: VULNERABLE (IBRS hardware + kernel support OR kernel with retpoline are needed to mitigate the vulnerability)

CVE-2017-5754 [rogue data cache load] aka 'Meltdown' aka 'Variant 3'
* Kernel supports Page Table Isolation (PTI): YES
* PTI enabled and active: YES
* Running as a Xen PV DomU: NO
> STATUS: NOT VULNERABLE (PTI mitigates the vulnerability)

A false sense of security is worse than no security at all, see --disclaimer
rick@rick-LIFEBOOK-AH530-HD6 /tmp $ [/B]


Note: One section suggests I am vulnerable but I have no idea what I should do.
Any suggestions please.
Thank you.

In all honesty, why do anything at all. Media has blown this way out of proportion. Unless your browser is vulnerable there has to be malware on your computer to abuse it, and there are MUCH more interesting things to do once they have root access other than some side channel snooping that may or may not give anything interesting of value at all. These vulnerabilities are extremities, and they were discovered by accident on a very low level virtualization level.

Only data centers with tons of virtual machines on the same server hardware have reasonable concerns as guest can attempt to snoop on eachother.

On private computers there's really nothing to be concerned about.

Well as with most things there's much misinformation out there, the trouble for those of us who are not expert is what to believe & what not to.
I'm sure that you can understand why newbies panic a little at stories like this, but it's good to get opinions from others so that I can form a considered opinion of my own.

thanks for your input.