I have a concern about Spectre & Meltdown Security exploits

Scan and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed.

Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices — with many different manufacturers’ processors and operating systems — are susceptible to these exploits, which are known as Meltdown and Spectre.

Scan strongly recommends installing the latest security updates for your system as soon as convenient as many manufacturers have already started releasing patches to address these exploits.

These patches take the form of security updates released by Microsoft for its Windows operating systems; see this page for further info.

Motherboard manufacturers such as Asus have also started to roll out BIOS updates, please visit this page to see if your motherboard is affected.

Initially, there were reports in the press that these security updates would significantly reduce performance, by as much as 25%. However, testing conducted by Intel has shown 0% performance reduction in games and limited reduction in other workloads.

Meanwhile Microsoft reported that ‘the majority of Azure customers should not see a noticeable performance impact with this update. We’ve worked to optimize the CPU and disk I/O path and are not seeing noticeable performance impact after the fix has been applied.’

Finally, Google has reported that ‘on most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.’