Meltdown and Spectre are the names of two serious security flaws that have recently been found within computer processors. They could allow hackers to steal sensitive data without the user knowing, one of them affecting computer chips made as far back as 1995.
Practically every computing device may be affected by Spectre. All modern processors, including those made by Intel, AMD and ARM, may be exposed.
Software vendors, including Microsoft, Apple and Google, are releasing software patches to fix the flaws. Such fixes typically mitigate the flaws by altering or disabling the use of speculative execution and cashing, causing performance degradation.
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