Intel to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve the critical security flaws

The latest vulnerabilities found in Intel, and supposedly in AMD and ARM chips have largely put every computing device on this planet at risk. The two critical flaws, dubbed as 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' could make it possible for a hacker to steal information stored in the memory of running apps on computing devices. The critical flaws are said to affect a wide range of computing devices including laptops, desktops; your mobile devices and also the servers in data centers running cloud computing services.

The information stored in your password managers, browsers, emails, and even picture gallery and documents can be at major risk until the vulnerabilities are patched.

This does sound scary and might force you to look for the best antivirus tool available online to protect your sensitive information.

Fortunately, technology leaders have been made aware of new security flaws affecting the worldwide computing devices. The research describes these critical flaws as software analysis methods that when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices.

Intel, the technology leader is majorly hit by the critical flaws but believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data. The leader in chip making has issued official statements saying that these exploits are caused by a "bug" or a "flaw" and are not unique to Intel products. Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices - with many different vendors' processors and operating systems - are susceptible to these exploits.

Intel also informed that the company is working closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively.

Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits. Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.

Intel and other vendors had planned to disclose this issue next week when more software and firmware updates will be available.

What can be done now at end-user level?

As per the information released by Intel, check with your operating system vendor or system manufacturer and apply any available updates as soon as they are available.

Following good security practices that protect against malware in general will also help protect against possible exploitation until updates can be applied.