You might have heard of the latest news in the IT industry – Spectre and Meltdown are one of the biggest found vulnerabilities and they affects nearly every computer chip manufactured in the last 20 years. The flaws are so fundamental and widespread that security researchers are calling them catastrophic.

For instance, JavaScript code on a website could use Spectre to trick a web browser into revealing user and password information. Attackers could exploit Meltdown to view data owned by other users and even other virtual servers hosted on the same hardware, which is potentially disastrous for cloud computing hosts.

But beyond the potential specific attacks themselves lies the fact that the flaws are fundamental to the hardware platforms running beneath the software we use every day. Even code that is formally secure as written turns out to be vulnerable, because the assumptions underlying the security processes built into the code — indeed, built into all of computer programming — have turned out to be false.

To fix or mitigate the trouble several software components of a computer need fixing or can help protecting from possible attacks. For desktop computers browsers and graphic card software updates help but ultimately the operating system will need patches applied. If you run Windows, Microsoft has already released a patches for Windows 7 and up (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073757/protect-your-windows-devices-against-spectre-meltdown), most Linux distributions have patched kernels available to download as well as Apple (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222).

Customer of TGmedia are protected with the latest kernel applied to servers running your platform, cloud solution, website or mail.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us, we’re happy to help.