All of the personal information and data that you have stored on your computer is at major risk. Meltdown and Spectre are hardware vulnerabilities, programmed flaws already existing within most “modern processors”, including the computers of you and your colleagues, and can result in the exposure of your personal information to attackers.

Normally, there exists barriers between the operating system and user applications, as well as between different applications. However, it is Meltdown and Spectre which break down these protective walls within the systems, allowing foreign programs access to all the memory which may be stored on there. Meltdown and Spectre act in an insidious manner, with victims unable to know whether they have been attacked or not. Additionally, antivirus’ are unlikely to prevent these attacks from occurring as they are difficult to differentiate from other regular programs.

As this attack targets and exposes your computer’s memory, your stored personal information including your passwords, encryption keys, emails, message logs, and data is all revealed to the attacker.

The severity of this situation lies in the fact that you may not have even realised that your security has been breached, as well as the fact that anybody is at risk of this attack.

However, and thankfully, software patches are available to protect again Meltdown and Spectre and will be required to be installed on all CPU’s and servers on your network.

If you are on our Managed Services, rest assured, as we will have these patches automatically pushed out onto your computers and servers this week, noting that there is no fee charged for this work as it is part of your package.

For clients who are not included on our Managed Services, it is of vital importance that patches be installed onto your network. We at Onsite Helper are happy to assist you in this process and ask that you email us at [email protected] for a quote.