Processor Vulnerability - Meltdown and Spectre

As you may be aware there have been two processor vulnerabilities published. These vulnerabilities affect various vendor CPUs including Intel processors. These latest vulnerabilities are named Meltdown and Spectre.

Meltdown

Meltdown breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system. This attack allows a program to access the memory, and thus also the secrets, of other programs and the operating system. Luckily this currently has patches available.

Spectre

Spectre breaks the isolation between different applications. It allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets. In fact, the safety checks of said best practices actually increase the attack surface and may make applications more susceptible to Spectre

Actions

BCN Group is working to secure our environments from these vulnerabilities as the providers are rolling out patches, these vendors include VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, CentOS, FreeBSD and others. For more information on what is available from our primary vendors please visit the links below.

VMware
Microsoft

Hosted Customers

BCN Group will be arranging maintenance windows where applicable to reboot the servers to enable the patching of Microsoft and Linux operating systems. The underlying infrastructure is currently being patched and will not affect any customers.

Managed Service Customers

BCN Group will be patching your servers and will contact you to arrange a maintenance window if required.

Desktop Users

Windows computers will be patched via windows updates if it is enabled.

Additional Information

Unfortunately, this patching may have an adverse effect on the CPU usage depending on applications. This increase in usage has been reported between 5% and 30%, but this is not predictable at the moment. For desktop users, this is likely not noticeable, but for server users we recommend monitoring your workloads.

If you have any worries or questions and would like assistance please contact you account manager on 0345 095 7000.