“Want to protect your Mac against the Zombieland (MDS) bug?” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reports for ZDNet. “According to Apple, becoming fully protected is not as simple as installing a patch.”
“Step one, however, is to install the latest updates, which are MacOS 10.14.5 for systems running Mojave, and Security Update 2019-003 High Sierra and Security Update 2019-003 Sierra for Macs running older operating systems,” Kingsley-Hughes reports.
“However, if you believe that you are at heightened risk of attack, Apple recommends that you disable hyper-threading on the CPU. And this comes with a huge performance cost, with Apple claiming ‘as much as a 40 percent reduction in performance with tests that include multithreaded workloads and public benchmarks,'” Kingsley-Hughes reports. “That’s a huge performance hit, and one that is likely to not only be noticeable, but have a major impact on how the Mac runs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Intel’s defective garbage is the gift that keeps on giving.
CERT: The only way to fix the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities is to replace the CPU. Intel et al. are going to try to sell us on a software bandaid instead of really fixing the problem properly. Watch and see. https://t.co/OeC2AoPdlK #Intel #AMD #ARM
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) January 4, 2018
SEE ALSO:
These Macs may be unable to be patched for future vulnerabilities similar to ‘ZombieLoad’ – May 16, 2019
How to protect your Mac from Intel CPU’s Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities – May 16, 2019
New secret-spilling flaw affects almost every Intel chip since 2011; Apple to release patches today – May 14, 2019
Macs may need ARM processors to survive – April 17, 2019
Researchers reveal new ‘Spoiler’ vulnerability in all Intel Core processors – March 6, 2019
Intel discloses new ‘Variant 3a’ and ‘Variant 4’ Spectre-like chip flaw vulnerabilities – May 22, 2018
Intel’s Spectre patch is causing reboot problems – January 12, 2018
In wake of Spectre and Meltdown, Intel CEO offers open letter, looks to restore confidence in Intel CPU security – January 11, 2018
Apple releases iOS and macOS updates with a mitigation for Spectre CPU flaw – January 8, 2018
Meltdown and Spectre: What Apple users need to know – January 8, 2018
How Apple product users can protect themselves against Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws – January 5, 2018
Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich sold off the majority of his shares after finding out about the irreparable chip flaws – January 4, 2018
Apple: All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected by Meltdown and Spectre security flaws – January 4, 2018
CERT: Only way to fix Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities is to replace CPU – January 4, 2018
Security flaws put nearly every modern computing device containing chips from Intel, AMD and ARM at risk – January 4, 2018
Apple has already partially implemented fix in macOS for ‘KPTI’ Intel CPU security flaw – January 3, 2018
Intel’s massive chip flaw could hit Mac where it hurts – January 3, 2018