ALERT: Meltdown/Spectre Vulnerability Announced

You may have heard recently about the “Meltdown” and “Spectre” vulnerabilities that could potentially allow hackers to read sensitive information stored in most modern computers and servers. First reported on January 3, 2018, researchers have discovered a core functionality in processors sold by all major chip manufacturers for the last twenty years that could make them vulnerable to attack.

 

What can you do about Meltdown and Spectre? Agilitec IT’s in-house computer security experts have been monitoring the developments daily and have seen thus far that the potential fixes are a greater risk to our clients’ networks than the vulnerabilities themselves. There have been no known attacks targeting the Meltdown or Spectre vulnerabilities. At the same time, the patch fixes rolled out by Intel, Microsoft, and other major players have conflicted with common antivirus platforms and/or caused significant performance degradation.

 

The good news is Agilitec IT maintains a Network Operations Center which stress-tests each published patch against several test environments to confirm the solution will be helpful and not detrimental to our customers’ systems. We also maintain an automated remote monitoring and management solution which allows us to rapidly roll out security fixes to all customer servers and computers. As a result, if you are a customer of Agilitec IT, you can rest easy knowing your systems will be automatically patched at the appropriate time with a minimum of unexpected downtime.

 

If you are not yet working with Agilitec IT, call us at (702) 720-1700 for more information on how we can protect your systems from Meltdown and Spectre.