Scary Chip Flaws Raise Spectre of Meltdown
Summary: Apple, Google, Microsoft and other vendors released updates for two hardware vulnerabilities, Meltdown and Spectre, discovered by researchers at Cyberus Technology, Google and the Graz University of Technology. Meltdown affects every Intel processor shipped since 1995 except Itanium and pre-2013 Atom, while Spectre affects desktops, laptops, cloud servers and smartphones from multiple vendors and is harder to exploit.
Key Takeaway: The flaws let a malicious program read secrets in another program's memory, including passwords, photos, emails and business documents, and depending on a cloud provider's infrastructure could expose data from other customers. Microsoft's emergency Windows patch also triggered blue screens for some antivirus users, and vendors had to add a registry key before Windows Update would deliver it, leaving many machines unpatched.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
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- Vulnerabilities & Patching
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