PSA: Intel Atom C2000 Chips Flaw Bricking Routers/NAS/Firewall devices that are powered by Linux, pfSense and FreeNAS

Intel’s Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct. But the semiconductor giant won’t disclose precisely how many chips are affected nor which products are at risk. Coincidentally, Cisco last week issued an advisory warning that several of its routing, optical networking, security and switch products sold prior to November 16, 2016 contain a faulty clock component that is likely to fail at an accelerated rate after 18 months of operation. These SoCs are popular in the FreeNAS, pfSense and DIY NAS home Linux server for being cheap, low power, ECC ram and multiple SATA ports.