Frisk called the new vulnerability, which Microsoft introduced on Windows 7 machines while trying to fix the Meltdown flaw, “Total Meltdown.” The new bug allows any process to read the complete memory contents of the system, and it also makes it possible to write code to arbitrary memory, too.
According to Frisk, no special attack or technique was needed. All he had to do was take advantage of Windows 7’s mapping of memory contents that belong to running processes.
The main issue and mistake made by Microsoft is that the company set the PML4 page table permission bit to User instead of the kernel Supervisor. This made it so the memory that would normally be assigned to the kernel be assigned to every process, including those running with user-level privileges. The PML4 is the base of the 4-level in-memory page table hierarchy that the CPU Memory Management Unit (MMU) uses to translate the virtual addresses of a process into physical memory addresses in RAM.