Intel – Chips from the past five years have been patched, more to come
The chip manufacturer says it has already issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years.
By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 per cent of processor products introduced within the past five years.
The firm is yet to announce a timetable for patching Intel processors more than five years old.
Reports have suggested that up to 15 years of Intel processors may be affected.
Google – Patch available today
On January 5, Google is issuing a security update to protect Android phones.
Google-branded phones should automatically download the update and you need to just install it. With Pixel and Pixel 2 the update will automatically install too.
Some Android phone manufacturers are slow to patch, so you should contact them to make sure they update it as soon as possible.
The patch for Chrome will be installed on January 23 and some Chromebooks had a mitigation in its OS 63, released in December, write Wired.
If don’t want to wait until then an experimental feature from Google called Site Isolation can help in the meantime. This feature makes it harder for malicious websites to access data from other websites you are looking at, writes Cnet.
To use this feature on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS or Android copy and paste chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process into the URL in Chrome. Click ‘Strict Site Isolation’ and then press ‘Enable’.
Save your work and then press ‘Relaunch now’.
A few Chromebooks are not expected to get the patch because they are too old. Here is a full list (look for ‘no’ in the right-hand column).
According to Google no other products are affected by these vulnerabilities.
Microsoft – Windows 10 patch available, older versions to come
There is already a patch available for Windows 10 which will automatically be applied.
For older operating systems a patch will be available next week. According to the company, Azure infrastructure is updated.
Linux – Patch available
The system has a patch.
Reports suggest it can slow down Linux-based systems by as much as 17 per cent. Users can opt out if they do not want it.
Amazon – Cloud services patched
The company says its web services have been updated.
Major cloud services aimed at business customers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, say they have already patched most of their services
Consumers should check with their device maker and operating system provider for security updates and install them as soon as possible.