Apple warns iPhones, iPads and Mac computers hit by Intel flaw

It has since updated that to say that one of the potential attacks could be used on some of its chips.

Apple simply distributed another help archive clarifying that iOS and macOS could be assaulted by the newfound (and exceptionally risky) Meltdown and Specter misuses.

Updating computing systems in businesses is already time-consuming and expensive, says Wendy Nather, security strategist at Duo Security. These methods attack the foundational modern computer building block capability that enforces protection of the OS from applications, and applications from one another.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said its updates should be completed soon and urged customers to patch their instance operating systems and consult with any third party software vendor. The federal organization says that “fully removing the vulnerability” requires replacing the hardware already embedded in millions of computing devices.

Brian Honan of BH Consulting said failing to install these patches will leave people at risk of hackers stealing information such as passwords from the memory of their computer. However, in case an user goes for a different operation, the files are dumped, and it is here that the threat has been detected. Malicious programmes could exploit these flaws “to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programmes”, the researchers said. None of these vulnerabilities have yet to be exploited in the wild.

The Meltdown vulnerability is a fundamental flaw affecting Intel chips, and allows attackers the ability to read otherwise protected sensitive information on computers and phones. These techniques potentially make items in kernel memory available to user processes by taking advantage of a delay in the time it may take the CPU to check the validity of a memory access call. It is a more complex, entrenched, and widespread flaw that uses Speculative Execution and Branch Prediction to achieve what Meltdown does with privilege escalation against Intel.

However, there are now no known attacks that have exploited these flaws, according to the Google researchers.

We wrote earlier that security researchers at Google and elsewhere discovered vulnerabilities in chips made by Intel, AMD, ARM Holdings and other companies.

In fact, Mac devices have always believed to be less vulnerable to viruses and security issues as compared to Android of Microsoft operating systems. Depending how long the hackers can keep the window open “they could see a very significant amount of data scroll by”.

Meltdown and Spectre have the potential to affect almost all kinds of devices that have a CPU. Intel has a tool you can use to check if your system is vulnerable to the bugs and Google has published further information here.

However, he said the pros of installing the patches outweigh the cons. Fixing the problems is a lot more complex. Resolving this issue will take time and incur costs. Many services can be exposed and affected. Fortunately software patches do exist to prevent it from happening. Performance can vary, as the impact of the KPTI mitigations depends on the rate of system calls made by an application.