Hyperthreading Security

[Ray Tracing]

I'm looking at an 8700k for my build, but I'm worried about all these security vulnerabilities with hyperthreading I keep seeing in the news.  For the average gamer, is this anything to worry about? 

 

The 9700K not having hyperthreading makes me really suspicious.  

[Skiiwee29]

for the average person, no its nothing to be worried about. These vulnerabilities and exploits 99999 our of 100000 are used to target companies with large, valuable data.. not some measly little gamer. 

[Firewrath9]

no. its a lot easier to just use regular malware on a home pc.

[LIGISTX]

1 minute ago, Ray Tracing said:

I'm looking at an 8700k for my build, but I'm worried about all these security vulnerabilities with hyperthreading I keep seeing in the news.  For the average gamer, is this anything to worry about? 

 

The 9700K not having hyperthreading makes me really suspicious.  

The 9700k doesn't have it simply so they could segment their lineup, 9900k wouldn't need to exist if 9700k has HT.

 

While hyperthreading does have some issues, honestly if malicious code gets onto your windows machine, that won't be what makes or breaks you. Its windows, its going to fold under pressure. The BIG issues around these exploits are in the virtualized environment world.

 

It comes into play with like AWS and other big boy cloud services. AWS (amazon web services) lets people pay for a slice of a server, do basically whatever they want, and that is virtualized so you are using the same hardware as many other folks. In this situation, you have the ability to run code which may, possibly, have the ability to grab some of the other server slices data which is a HUGE exploit for such a situation. Basically, it allows bad actors to possibly rent a little slice of an amazon server and potentially be able to sniff out some data from other users.

 

But, since your a single user on your computer (or even if you have friends or family who use it, typically only 1 user is logged in at a time, and I assume you mostly trust those using your PC not to try and exploit it (its also windows, you can get around a windows password in about 38 seconds if you really wanted to)), its really not a big issue. Yes, theoretically, some program can sniff out data from other programs via this vector, but once again, it would be easier to get your data other ways IMO... So I wouldn't worry about it. Only the most security conscious folks would worry, and they are a level above 99.999% of computer users. There are ways to gain access to information through the PCIe bus since it has basically direct CPU access, can grab data out of RAM, plenty of ways to fall into many many security rabbit holes that most everyone in the world will never even need to worry about lol.

[Ray Tracing]

Thank you for giving me the real story, good to know the average user doesn't have much to worry about.