Patch Verification Queries for CPU Vulnerabilities Across Azure and AWS VMs

Retrospective: this article looks back at events from January 2018, written in 2026 with the benefit of hindsight.

Hardware vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre are hard to detect being exploited. The practical detection task is making sure every system actually received the fixes. These patch verification checks work across Azure and AWS.

What to verify

• Guest operating systems have the security updates that include the mitigations.
• Firmware or microcode updates are applied where you manage them (on-premises and dedicated hosts).
• Browsers and runtimes that received mitigations are current.
• Any registry or kernel settings required to enable mitigations are set.

Azure

Azure Update Manager and Defender for Cloud show missing updates per machine. In Azure Resource Graph or Log Analytics, query update assessment results to list machines missing security updates older than your SLA.

AWS

Systems Manager Patch Manager compliance shows which instances are missing patches against your baseline. Amazon Inspector reports operating system vulnerabilities by CVE, so you can search for specific vulnerabilities across all accounts.

On Windows hosts

Microsoft published the SpeculationControl PowerShell module, which reports whether mitigations are present and enabled on a Windows machine. It is useful for spot checks.

Make it continuous

1. Build a dashboard showing machines missing critical updates beyond your SLA.
2. Alert when a machine falls out of compliance.
3. Treat exceptions as tracked risks with an owner and an end date.

When a new variant appears

Search your vulnerability tools for the specific CVE, list affected systems by owner, and track them to zero. The value of good inventory shows most clearly on days like this.