Everything You Need to Know about Spectre and Meltdown and Its Effect for Your Computer

Spectre and Meltdown are currently the hottest topics in the digital world. These two CPU bugs can really threaten the security of your data so it is important to gather all information about these two vulnerabilities.

What are Spectre and Meltdown?

Spectre and Meltdown really wreak havoc the digital world and the two vulnerabilities are even dubbed as the worst CPU bugs ever found. Meltdown will break the boundaries that separating programs and operating system. As a result, a program will be able to read kernel memory of an operating system. Meanwhile, Spectre is even a bigger threat. It can break isolations between different applications and make programs leak the secrets they supposed to keep.

The worst thing about Spectre and Meltdown is the fact that they will let programs steal data that is being processed on the computer. The two exploits will make so many devices vulnerable to various cyber security issues. Basically, Spectre and Meltdown are threats for computing devices that were manufactured in the last couple of decades, and it can even affect smartphone.

Are You Affected?

UK’s National Cyber Security Centre reported that at this point there is no device that has been affected by either Meltdown or Spectre. However, it is hard to tell whether it is true or not because these two exploits work very subtly that it can be very difficult to detect them. To find out whether a device has been affected or not, Microsoft’s newly released PowerShell cmdlet can be used. PowerShell will not only detect the presence of the Meltdown and Spectre but also suggest some ways to protect the system from the two exploits and the security threats they can cause.

At this point, the effectivity of PowerShell is actually still questionable. Furthermore, you should not let your guard down because Meltdown and Spectre are very dangerous bugs that can affect almost every devices and systems. Spectre is not only capable to affect desktop PCs or laptops, but also smartphone, server and Cloud. It also threatens to affect Intel Chips that was produced since 1995 along with AMD and ARM. Meanwhile, Meltdown is said to not affect smartphone, but it is still a huge threat for every processor that was manufacture since 1995, just like Spectre.

How to Stay Safe

Due to the severity of the issue and the huge security threats the two vulnerabilities bring, it is very important to know how to stay safe. At this point, the only thing people can do to keep their data safe is by keeping their devices updated since Intel will keep releasing new patches to take care of this problem.

Intel is currently developing more updates for various Intel-based machines that will make the systems completely immune from the two dangerous bugs. By keeping their devices updated, people will not miss these important security patches when they are launched and leave their devices vulnerable to threats.

Furthermore, there are also some precautions people can take while waiting for the newest security patches such as preventing JavaScript loading and also enabling Site Isolation for Chrome user. This is not going to fix the core problems but it will make the devices less vulnerable from hackers’ attacks.

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