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Evening Water Glow at Locks
January 2018

The Spectre of a Meltdown

The Spectre of a Meltdown

Profile picture for user John Locke

John Locke is the lead developer and founder of Freelock, LLC. In addition to being a proficient web developer, he is an experienced technical writer, network administrator, and all around problem solver. He has worked with computers since 1984, and currently advises small businesses on open source software.

Submitted by John Locke on Thu, 01/11/2018 - 16:31

The news was supposed to come out Tuesday, but it leaked early. Last week we learned about three variations of a new class of attacks on modern computing, before many vendors could release a patch -- and we come to find out that the root cause may be entirely unpatchable, and can only be fixed by buying new computers.

Today Microsoft released a patch -- which they had to quickly pull when they discovered that it crashed computers with AMD chips.

Essentially Spectre and Meltdown demonstrate a new way of attacking your smartphone, your laptop, your company's web server, your desktop, maybe even your tv and refrigerator.

Meltdown - Animated
Meltdown in Action

This all sounds dreadfully scary. And it is... but don't panic! Instead, read on to learn how this might affect you, your website, and what you can do to prevent bad things from getting worse.

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The web is changing so rapidly these days, and at Freelock we feel on top of those changes. With our new focus on a monthly topic for our Vision plan, we find ourselves at a sweet spot between the old web and the new, between intensive data-driven applications and slick animated websites that change what can be done on the web.

We (finally) updated our good old website to the latest and greatest Drupal 8, we're doing a lot of special enhancements and really cool Commerce customizations, and we're starting to do a lot more front-end development loosely coupled to back-end data -- really fun stuff!

We're looking forward to a great 2018! Expect to hear from us just a bit more often, as we find ourselves in a unique position to comment on current trends, topics you need to understand on the web, and newsworthy stories like Spectre and Meltdown.

Topic

  • Recovering from attacks
  • Preventing Attacks

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