This week a couple of truly nasty computer hardware bugs were revealed by security researchers. Dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, the exploits take advantage of performance features found in Intel CPU chips as far back as 1995 and most other modern CPUs from AMD and ARM. Luckily, chip and software makers have been working in the background for months on fixes and mitigations, and many of them have already been deployed.

I’ll walk you through what these bugs are, what they actually mean to you, and what you can do to limit your exposure to them. Sadly, this is probably just the first of many hardware bugs that will be revealed - and hardware bugs are often very hard if not impossible to fix without simply replacing the entire device.

For Further Insight:

* Official website for Meltdown/Spectre: https://meltdownattack.com/

* Helpful list of affected systems and current state of fixes: https://gizmodo.com/check-this-list-to-see-if-you-re-still-vulnerable-to-me-1821780843

* How to surf the web safely: http://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/browser-safety-choose-weapon/

* Help me to help you! Visit: https://patreon.com/FirewallsDontStopDragons