Meltdown and Spectre is Bad News for Everyone

meltdown spectre

The spectre and Meltdown are capable of targeting CPU chips of all kinds. There are very few CPU chips that are not affected by this. It isn’t a PC vs Mac or iPhone Vs Android problem. It is a universal problem that basically affects everyone. Smartphone, governments, banks, hospitals and more can have their data stolen.

How do Spectre and Meltdown work? Without going into technical verbiage, it is a hardware level exploitive. It takes advantage of how the CPU is designed. Even though chip makers have patents over their designs and have different physical hard designs, they often share a general ideology on how the design behaves. The spectre and Meltdown take advantage of this idea and are able to basically affect many devices regardless of their chip model. To make the CPU faster, chip makers have designed the CPU to have a process called speculative execution. It basically tries to predict what the user might use next by running random bits of data and being reading to execute quickly if the prediction was right. This process allows the attacker to run code on your computer without your consent.

How can it attack you and what are the fixes? The problem is that it is a design flaw in how processors are made so it can be fixed without upgrading to new hardware that has this fixed. For PC users, they simply can the switch out the CPU when a fixed version comes out. For everyone else, smartphones users, laptops users, and users of devices with the CPU solder on will have to fully replace their device. A very expensive problem but that is the only way to fully protect yourself. A software fix can slow down the exploits but is it only a matter of time before hackers find ways around that. You can simply visit a website, and we attacked. This attack could sneak around your computer without a problem. It is basically giving a criminal X-Ray vision into a vault. The hackers can look at passwords and sensitive data.

I feel really uncomfortable about how widespread and powerful the exploits are. This is a hacker’s dream. They can work on this and be able to affect millions. Once someone figures out how to use this exploit, everyone else will have access to this. For this threat, I could follow all the right habits of making good passwords, but they can easily be accessed. It seems like it’s pointless to follow up on threats and try to protect ourselves. What makes it worse is that you have to spend money on new hardware to fix this problem. The companies create this problem, and they will make more money out of this.

Porup, J.M. “Meltdown and Spectre affect the smartphone in your pocket. Should you be worried?” ITworld, CSO, 4 Jan. 2018, www.itworld.com/article/3245796/mobile/meltdown-and-spectre-affect-the-smartphone-in-your-pocket-should-you-be-worried.html
Picture: https://www.itworld.com/article/3245796/mobile/meltdown-and-spectre-affect-the-smartphone-in-your-pocket-should-you-be-worried.html

One thought on “Meltdown and Spectre is Bad News for Everyone

  1. The good news is that Intel is working on fixing this problem. They are getting ready to roll out a patch for the general public, but for now, it will only be available to large technology firms. This is good news, but at the same time, they are unsure of the extent to which they will be able to fully mitigate the threat that Spectre poses since it exploits a fundamental feature of CPUs.

    Even if Intel’s patch is successful, there is a good chance that many users would not update their devices. There are many people that lag behind on updates. They do this because patches occasionally cause problems; they can cause technical glitches or decrease the processing speed. However, it is important for people to update their devices because not updating your device when an update is released puts you at the largest risk of being hacked. While people are hesitant to implement updates for Spectre, they should update their device when it is available because it will help protect their information.

    https://www.techrepublic.com/article/spectre-patch-new-intel-update-released-after-earlier-fix-caused-random-reboots/

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