TOBY SHAPSHAK: A scary time in the digital world
Be vigilant with your information as vulnerabilities could undermine the core of our computers’ security
Cybersecurity is arguably going to be the biggest trend — and threat — in 2018. I wrote that sentence before the shock news last week from Intel that all (yes all) its processors have two serious security defects that were discovered last year. In fact, all processors contain vulnerabilities that could potentially make all computers insecure, as they affect chips made by Intel’s main PC rival AMD, and mobile-orientated processors by ARM and Qualcomm. Called Meltdown and Spectre, like names for villains and villainous plots in a spoof spy movie, these flaws affect just about every computing device, including smartphones, laptops, desktop PCs and tablets and may affect all operating systems. Meltdown — which one of the researchers who discovered it, Daniel Gruss, called "probably one of the worst CPU bugs ever found" — could allow hackers to access the processor’s kernel (the secure core that runs deep innards of the operating system). The patches to fix this could slow the computer d...
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