Microprocessors Vulnerable?

Johnman · January 5, 2018

Good afternoon, morning, night, ect..

It was recently announced that microprocessors might (do) have a real big vulnerability in them. I'm not going to try and explain it but, luckily, our IT manager sent out an email earlier today giving us a nice TL:DR

"Yesterday, the major chip manufacturers publicly disclosed that there are 2 new security threats that affect practically every computing device being used today including your laptops, workstations, and smartphones.

Essentially hackers have discovered a flaw in the design of most micro-processors that have been shipped over the last 10+ years.

The “exploits” as they are being called are named Spectre and Meltdown. Yes, that sounds like something from a 007 movie, but I can assure you that this one is real and very serious.

The Meltdown flaw mostly affects Intel-powered machines like your desktop or MacBook, while the Spectre flaw affects processors from AMD and ARM. That means your smartphone is also likely affected by the processor flaw.

These exploits allow hackers to see the memory (including company and personal information) inside other programs and services down to the core of the operating system. There are no currently available antivirus software that will protect us from that nor can it detect the exploit if it exists in your system. In fact, most antivirus software makes the deployment of the fixes even more difficult.

Our infrastructure team will be working very hard to deploy fixes to all machines and this is going to take some time since the announcement is brand new and many of the fixes are still being worked on and are not available to us yet." ~Boss dude

Yes, I know that was a lot of information for a TL:DR but, a lot of stuff needs to get put out there

Here are some of the articles we found on this:

Newyork times: https://goo.gl/YQVCVm

Business Insider: https://goo.gl/RKzJSJ

Stay safe out there!