INTEL ZOMBIELOAD VULNERABILITY CORRECTION SLOWS COMPUTER EQUIPMENT

ORIGINAL CONTENT: https://www.securitynewspaper.com/2019/05/15/intel-zombieload-vulnerability-correction-slows-computer-equipment/

The tech company Intel has confirmed that the problems discovered on their processors chips imply a decrease in the performance of the computers of some users, report experts in information security services.

According to the reports, the data centers could be affected to a greater extent by these corrections, although they mention that this impact should be minimal for most of the users.

The vulnerability, known as Zombieload, comes after a wave of similar cyber threats, such as Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, discovered last year. This vulnerability, which for now only exists at the theoretical level, could allow a threat actor to access the tasks performed by any Core or Xeon CPU manufactured from 2011.

Cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are some examples of companies that drive their data centers with this technology. Information security services firms mention that these companies have already taken the necessary steps to protect themselves from this vulnerability without sacrificing the performance of their systems, although more security measures or infrastructure resources may be required in the future.

The Zombieload vulnerability was discovered by a group of researchers from various European countries, such as Belgium and Austria.

According to experts, this flaw could allow a malicious hacker to steal confidential information or the ability to decrypt protected files. An attacker could access information such as a user’s browsing history, web site content, passwords, or encryption keys, as report by information security services experts.

Although the company has mentioned that exploiting this vulnerability in the wild would be too complex, specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) mention that users should not ignore security updates for implementations on the various potentially impacted operating systems.

On the other hand, Intel claims that the higher power consumption, and the resulting low system performance, could more significantly affect the data centers that handle the Java programming language.