Billions of Devices at Risk of Attacks Because of Two Critical Hardware Bugs

Dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, the two hardware bugs found in Intel processors affect almost every computing device that made in the past two decades, no matter if it’s a mobile phone or personal computer. They allow malicious programs to steal sensitive data processed on the affected machine, and we’re talking about billions of devices here. Machines running in the cloud appear to be the most affected by the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715 for Spectre, and CVE-2017-5754 Meltdown) as it’s possible to steal data from other customers as well, but any computer with a modern process is at risk of attacks if the operating system they’re running isn’t updated to the latest available software release that includes patches for these bugs.