INTEL SECURITY BUG - ALL PROCESSORS ARE AFFECTED - Are you affected by the bug? Most certainly, yes.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) -- Intel's CEO sold shares in his company several months after Google informed the chipmaker of a serious security problem affecting its products. CEO Brian Krzanich sold about $39 million in stocks and options in late November, before the security vulnerability was publicly known. Intel says it was notified about the bugs in June.

Meltdown and Spectre work on personal computers, mobile devices, and in the cloud. Depending on the cloud provider's infrastructure, it might be possible to steal data from other customers.The widespread vulnerability could allow a hacker to steal information stored in the memory of the chip itself, including things such as passwords and cached files. It could also pave the way for attackers to weaken other security features. The vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to steal information stored in the memory of a wide range of computer chips running on personal devices — not just computers and phones, but also the servers in data centers, including those used to run cloud computing services. Meltdown breaks the mechanism that keeps applications from accessing arbitrary system memory. Consequently, applications can access system memory. Spectre tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory. Both attacks use side channels to obtain the information from the accessed memory location.


Chips potentially affected date back more than five years, with some products listed on Intel's website about the vulnerabilities having been introduced as far back as 2008.

Intel shares fell 2.4 percent as of mid-day on Thursday to $44.17.

'Meltdown' and 'Spectre'

One of the vulnerabilities, dubbed Meltdown, is known to affect Intel chips.

Another, Spectre, could affect chips from many vendors, including Intel as well as AMD and Arm.

The computer industry is scrambling to patch security vulnerabilities in the chips that power nearly all the world's computers, including PCs, phones, and data center computers.

Intel and AMD chips power nearly all personal computers and the computers used in data centers, including those that power online services and cloud computing services, while Arm chips power many smartphones.







Project Zero team at Google :


So far, there are three known variants of the issue:


Read more here from Graz University of Technology :
Read more here from the Project Zero team at Google :