Meltdown and Spectre security

Published January 6, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

How the Meltdown and Spectre security holes fixes will affect you

Get ready to patch every piece of computing gear in your home and company to deal with this CPU nightmare. You can’t get away from Meltdown and Spectre. These chip bugs will make your life miserable. Everything you run — and I mean everything — PCs, Macs, iPhones, tablets, cloud computing, and servers — use vulnerable CPUs. Apple, Linux developers, and Microsoft have all released patches. And all of them will slow down at least some of your programs.-Meltdown and Spectre security

While Intel gets most of the heat for these hardware vulnerabilities, it’s not alone. According to Red Hat, ARM, IBM System Z, POWER8 (Big Endian and Little Endian), and POWER9 (Little Endian) processors are all open to attack. AMD claims its chips are largely invulnerable, but it concedes there’s a near zero — but not zero — the risk of exploitation from one class of attack.

So, what does that mean for you? Here’s what the experts say you can expect from your devices and services. Continue reading →

Posted in cyber-security, cyberattack, hacker attacks, Malware, Security | Tagged IT Security, Meltdown, Meltdown and Spectre security, Spectre security