Intel Security bug. What does it mean for you?

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Let me give you the short and simple breakdown.

UPDATED at 8:35est 1-3-18: This vulnerability affects AMD and many mobile chipsets as well.
This means that basically every modern chipsets and OS is affected by this security vulnerability. 

Update:This should say INTEL, AMD and ARM instead of just INTEL.

Original: INTEL has a bug in the way hardware addresses virtual memory in the chip.   This could allow hackers to access a lot of information that they shouldn't be able to and make it easier for them to take over your computer. 

This will affect EVERY INTEL chip regardless of the Operating System.   All the Operating System vendors are releasing patches very soon to address this issue so it is CRITICAL that you DO YOUR PATCHES!

On windows systems you are going to take a performance hit.  Your system will be slower after the patch, up to 30% slower.  Mac OS has been patched since 10.3.2 (if you aren't on this version upgrade ASAP.) and Linux should be getting a patch this month. 

If you have an AMD processor on your system.  Do your patches anyway, but you won't suffer the performance hit Intel users will.

The vulnerabilities are called meltdown and Spectre.  Both are extremely nasty and this is the first vulnerability which I have read about that could steal information across virtual machines.  Time to update my virtualization article.

For further reading:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

https://www.axios.com/how-the-giants-of-tech-are-dealing-with-a-massive-chip-vulnerability-2522206367.html

https://meltdownattack.com/

Thank you for reading.
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