Some of the somewhat fantastical reporting contributed towards a rushed and botched response to mitigating the vulnerabilities in many ways.Įarly software patches for the duo were rife with optimization problems, leading to performance regressions for several reasons. What Was the Patching Situation for Spectre and Meltdown?ĭespite the low probability of the vulnerabilities being targeted in live attacks, their discovery initially resulted in quite a media frenzy overall modern CPUs’ susceptibility (which included PCs, tablets, and smartphones) to such a fundamental flaw. While plans are not typically permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious exploit could allow an actor to access sensitive data stored in additional running programs’ memory data that could include passwords stored in a password manager or browser, personal photos, emails, or critical business documents. These are hardware vulnerabilities in almost all modern processors, which could allow programs to steal data currently being processed on a computer. What made Spectre and Meltdown the talk of the town in 2018 was the enormous scale of potentially affected devices. The threat actor’s technical demands wishing to exploit the bugs are significant, albeit slightly lower since the public exploits’ release. If somehow you’ve missed it-you should prioritize patching the four Microsoft Exchange zero-days that are reportedly being used by multiple advanced threat groups in live attacks. Despite identifying these working exploits, the likelihood of these issues being exploited in the wild is still low, at least much lower than other bugs that have been highlighted in the last couple of weeks. You may be thinking, this is simply another one of thousands of exploitable vulnerabilities currently in circulation, and in many ways, you are right. Why are the Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities Dangerous? Read this blog to find out why it’s essential to keep calm in times of common agitation. Three years later, a working exploit has been finally released and has caused the security community to return to that 2018 anxious state. Given the technical sophistication required to exploit Spectre and Meltdown, many organizations left these vulnerabilities unpatched to avoid reducing their machines’ capabilities. This blog will look at these two notorious vulnerabilities and their evolving impact on the media and the security community. The researcher who discovered the exploits, Julian Voisin, has claimed that the exploits had been thoroughly tested and successful. The exploits had been uploaded to VirusTotal’s database in February, with one exploit for Linux reportedly allowing unprivileged users to read the contents of files that store user passwords in both Windows and Linux systems. ![]() ![]() In the past week, a security researcher discovered several working exploits for the infamous Spectre and Meltdown hardware vulnerabilities (also known affectionately in some circles as ‘Smeltdown’), resulting in panic back in January 2018. You can read further on Meltdown and Spectre: the Story So Far. Note: This blog is a revisit on our 2018 coverage of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
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