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What are Spectre and Meltdown?

 

Spectre and Meltdown, the two words definitely sound very scary and ominous.  They are names given to potential security flaws identified in computer chips.  Which chips, you may ask?  The answer is even more scary.. pretty much all of them from the major chip manufacturers Intel, AMD, and ARM dating back as far as 1995 to the present.  This affects tablets, phones, computers and other devices running on these chips.  Both Windows and Apple computers as well as computers running on other operating system are at risk from the flaws.

The chip manufacturers have started releasing patches to fix the problem.  The fixes are coming with their own set of problems though as some of the patches have caused some older computers to stop booting.  Because of the nature of the flaw, changing the way the chips work may also cause computer to become slower after they are patched.  It’s a very confusing and complicated process to roll out patches to so many devices which are running so many different versions of software.  There are bound to be more problems that arise from fixing these security risks.

What can you do?  As always, keep your software up to date and make sure your computer is receiving operating systems updates and driver updates from the manufacturer.  So far there are no reports of these chips actually being exploited.  However, the security holes were just revealed recently, so now that they are known to hackers the risk is probably larger.