All Intel Processors Might Have a Massive Security Flaw

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You can get all the techy details here.

But in short, official researchers have discovered a hole in all Intel processors which if accessed just right by malware or any other malicious code, would give another person complete access to a lot of things on your system but mainly all your passwords and such.
 
Thank you for the head up. The only good news out of this that this can be patched at the OS level but having a security flow at the hardware level is no good still.
 
So anyone with a low end weak laptop could end up with a paper weight?
Not so fast, someone did some testing and here's the results. Mind you this is just one guy's testing and others may have a different experience.

I tested this 'Intel Fails Patch' on two machines, one is a spare gaming rig, the other is a Zotac Mini-PC with an Intel CPU.

Ryzen 5 1500X Light Gaming Rig
Before patch:
CPU - 998 (Ryzen 5 1500X)
GPU - 883 (1070 GTX FTW)
After patch:
CPU - 918
GPU - 818

That's a full 8% loss in performance. That's significant, virtually the difference between a full CPU upgrade.

Next machine is a Zotac Mini-PC with an Intel N3150 CPU.
Before patch:
CPU - 188
GPU - 107
After patch:
CPU - 188
GPU - 107

So clearly, this patch did nothing to impact the N3150, but had an impact on my Ryzen.. So whats up with that?

Source: Major Intel CPU Hardware Vulnerability Found, Could Cost 35% Performance
 
This is concerning for the many PC users in the world which use an affected CPU

I think it would be a good idea to have one PC to strictly use for sensitive tasks like online banking, e-mail, and logging on website, and make sure the PC is fully updated with the latest security updates, and using a more secure operating system like Debian Linux.
 
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This is concerning for the many PC users in the world which use an affected CPU

I think it would be a good idea to have one PC to stri
ctly use
for sensitive tasks like online banking, e-mail, and logging on website, and make sure the PC is fully updated with the latest security updates, and using a more secure operating system like Debian Linux.
Sadly Linux needed to be patched and the mac OS is no different as well.

Also there may not be an issue with performance afterall but still: Serious Intel CPU design flaw may require a Windows patch, but probably won't affect gaming performance | PC Gamer
 
This is concerning for the many PC users in the world which use an affected CPU

I think it would be a good idea to have one PC to stri
ctly use
for sensitive tasks like online banking, e-mail, and logging on website, and make sure the PC is fully updated with the latest security updates, and using a more secure operating system like Debian Linux.
In case you didn't know, this flaw affects all processors from 1995 all the way to 2018.
Since it's such an old hardware flaw, you have to expect every operating system to be volunerable, which was the case here.

Fortunately, the Linux community, Google, and Microsoft normally respond really quick to such things, and often have things already patched before the flaw will be publicly announced.
The only concerns are typically Apple and phone manufacturers that put Android on their devices.

Apple due to a combination of no transparency and the low frequency of updates.
And phone manufacturers (and sometimes ISPs too, if ISP branded) because there's just no Android phone that's made exactly as intended (but instead, they love to add additional drivers, UI's, among other things that will break your phone if they would apply an as vanilla as possible Android image on them).
 
Additionally, I figured out Linux Kernel 4.4 (the branch I'm using, because anything newer freezes my laptop randomly) got its Kernel patched 3 days ago (according to The Linux Kernel Archives).
However, since I'm using Manjaro (and thus rely on testing from the distro maintainers), my Kernel is one minor release older.
So technically, I'm still volunerable.
 
^That's another thing that concerns me, there has been so much talk about this before an offical patch has been released. You know hackers are trying to exploit this right now.

I bet, government hackers may already be exploiting this flaw, and other flaws which it finds, but don't tell the public and companies like MS, Intel, and other companies about. The government is not one person, so the many employees in Law performance and Military who work for the government may think it is alright to exploit as many computers as possible, and some government's may ask CPU makers to make a backdoor into their CPU.
 
A little bit irrelevant to the issue, but I saw this between the Mastodon feeds yesterday and thought it would add a bit of humour here.
630607d4266c3d1b.jpg

Those look some good potato chips. Nacho chips, and Chocolate chips found in Chocolate chip cookies are also safe from Spectre and meltdown.
 
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