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.
