The Washington Post follows up on last week's news that most of the world's microchips contain significant security flaws that could leave sensitive information vulnerable to attack. The Meltdown and Spectre bugs are the result of microchip design in recent years to make computers faster and more efficient. Security professionals say new patches address the Meltdown flaw for the most part, but a fix for the Spectre flaw, which is also more difficult to exploit, may take years. Johns Hopkins Computer Science Prof. Avi Rubin characterized the flaws as "the most significant security news we've had in the last 10 years." The U.S. National Security Agency said it did not know about the flaws. White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Rob Joyce said that the "U.S. government would never put a major company like Intel in a position of risk like this to try to hold open a vulnerability." (Registration may be required to access this story.)
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