How to Handle Meltdown and Spectre on Linux Ubuntu

1. How do you protect against Spectre and meltdown?
2. Are meltdown and Spectre fixed?
3. Should I disable Spectre and meltdown?
4. Does CPU affect meltdown and Spectre?
5. How does Spectre meltdown work?
6. Can Spectre and meltdown be exploited remotely?
7. Why are Spectre and meltdown so dangerous?
8. What CPUs are affected by meltdown?
9. What CPUs does Spectre affect?
10. Does Spectre affect AMD?
11. What does Spectre mean?
12. Has Meltdown been exploited?

How do you protect against Spectre and meltdown?

How to protect your PC against Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws

1. Update your operating system.
2. Check for firmware updates.
3. Update your browser.
4. Update other software.
5. Keep your antivirus active.

Are meltdown and Spectre fixed?

The patch process since January 2018 has been nothing short of boggling. ... Then at the end of January, Microsoft also announced that the Spectre and Meltdown patches for Windows 10 were compromising performance and causing random fatal errors, confirming that their security fixes were buggy.

Should I disable Spectre and meltdown?

Windows allows you to disable the Meltdown and Spectre protection after installing the patch, making your system vulnerable to these dangerous attacks but eliminating the performance penalty that comes with the fix. WARNING: We strongly recommend against doing this.

Does CPU affect meltdown and Spectre?

Google says “effectively every” Intel processor released since 1995 is vulnerable to Meltdown, regardless of the OS you're running or whether you have a desktop or laptop. ... AMD processors aren't affected by the Meltdown bug. Chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM are susceptible to Spectre attacks.

How does Spectre meltdown work?

Meltdown exploits a race condition between memory access and privilege level checking while an instruction is being processed. In conjunction with a CPU cache side-channel attack, privilege level checks can be bypassed, allowing access to memory used by an operating system, or other running processes.

Can Spectre and meltdown be exploited remotely?

Researchers from Graz University in Austria released new research on July 26 detailing how the Spectre CPU speculative execution vulnerability could be used over a remote network. ... With NetSpectre, the researchers detail a novel, albeit slow, approach to remotely exploiting Spectre on a vulnerable system.

Why are Spectre and meltdown so dangerous?

Spectre and Meltdown are alike in that neither is a true virus. Rather, they are vulnerabilities within the computer processor that are exploited to carry out an attack on a computer. What makes Spectre uniquely dangerous is its ability to cause permanent, physical damage to your computer.

What CPUs are affected by meltdown?

However, ARM announced that some of their processors were vulnerable to Meltdown. Google has reported that any Intel processor since 1995 with out-of-order execution is potentially vulnerable to the Meltdown vulnerability (this excludes Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom CPUs).

What CPUs does Spectre affect?

As of 2018, almost every computer system is affected by Spectre, including desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Specifically, Spectre has been shown to work on Intel, AMD, ARM-based, and IBM processors. Intel responded to the reported security vulnerabilities with an official statement.

Does Spectre affect AMD?

Spectre affects virtually all out-of-order CPUs that use speculative execution to increase performance, including AMD and Arm's processors.

What does Spectre mean?

Spectre, or rather SPECTRE, stands for the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, a global terrorist organization that plays a major role in the Bond stories. (You have to give them credit for stating their intentions openly with that acronym.)

Has Meltdown been exploited?

It's been a year since the IT world experienced two of the worst bugs in history: Meltdown and Spectre. These well-known bugs are complicated to resolve, mostly due to the exploited vulnerabilities' ubiquity. ... Intel, AMD, ARM, and even Nvidia were victims when these bugs were disclosed to the public in January of 2018.