This seems a bit serious:
Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs � The Register
Vulnerability Note VU#584653 - CPU hardware vulnerable to side-channel attacks
Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel
It's not that serious yet. However, it might get serious after hackers, now knowing about, this write exploit code as they will.
There are no known exploits to date and no know malicious code to exploit.
Obligatory :
thats it. A ridiculous theoretical problem will become a real problem by communicating it to the world. Meltdown is IT's biggest idiocy of all times.
At least Intel didn't know about it for literally years while continuing to manufacture vulnerable chips - oh wait...
If nobody forced them to, nobody would ever fix it. Sometimes that happens in a closed industry.
I noticed that Apple released patches they say covers both Meltdown & Spectre for, they say, most of their devices and I updated all my Apple devices with their latest security patches which claim to mitigate this risk.
So, at least in Apple's case, they seem to be well on top of these bugs.
Hi Guys,
Many of you might be interested in this news item from the UK's BBC media today (18th January). Obviously, I don't know how long this link will be valid before it's taken down, anyway, here is the news:
I really hope that Intel will still fix these invulnerabilities in the new processors
There is more to come.
Spectre-NG (or Spectre V2, not to be mixed up with Spectre variant 2) is a set of several (a German magazine says 8) new variants.