It’s coming to light over the last 24 hours in mainstream media, that there’s been a super serious security flaw discovered in pretty much all Intel CPUs that power your computers, both home and office that were made in the last 10 years. The security flaw also affects Phones and even Apple Macs which is interesting. AMD have reported that they are not affected, yet rumours suggest that this might not be the case. This is not a bug that just affects Microsoft, because it’s an issue affecting the CPU itself, and how it works, it does not matter what operating system is running on top of it. I wonder if the NSA has been aware of this and using it in the past. If so, I’m sure they won’t be happy that this is now public and being fixed.
Here’s a few articles for the techies out there to read.
https://betanews.com/2018/01/03/intel-security-flaw/
What is more concerning is that there are exploits in the wild that use this.
https://www.wired.com/story/critical-intel-flaw-breaks-basic-security-for-most-computers/
Intel are working on a patch for their CPUs, the problem is that in order to fix the issue, it will slow the computer down. Testing so far has seen performance drops of around 20% on Linux.
Microsoft have announced that they will be patching their Azure environment in the next week to prevent potential security breaches due to this issue
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16844630/intel-processor-security-flaw-bug-kernel-windows-linux
What can I do about it?
Right now – nothing. There is no public patch available, but it is coming. Once it’s available, you will need to deploy it ASAP to your computers, and phones etc. I’m wondering how vendors will handle things like phones that are 5 years old, will they patch them or not?
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