The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) released guidance Thursday warning of security vulnerabilities that could impact a computer’s central processing unit (CPU). Named Meltdown and Spectre, the vulnerabilities could allow attackers to obtain sensitive information from computers.
“With both variants of the Spectre attack, the impact is that a process may leak sensitive data to other processes on a system,” according to a release by NCCIC. “Meltdown is related to the Spectre attack in that it also uses a cache side channel to access data that otherwise wouldn’t be available.”
Thursday’s release contained links to patches and other information regarding the threat and also encouraged users to refer to their operating system vendors for more information.
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