The tech industry is scrambling this week to quickly update cloud services and other products after vulnerabilities in processors used on almost every computer were disclosed to The Register by researchers Tuesday, according to CNBC.
Here is how three tech giants are responding to the recently discovered security vulnerabilities in Intel Corp.'s and other manufacturers' chips.
1. Amazon noted the vulnerability to its cloud service, Amazon Web Services, "has existed for more than 20 years in modern processor architectures like Intel, AMD and Arm across servers, desktops and mobile devices." Amazon added it already protected nearly all incidents involving AWS, though customers still must patch their operating systems.
2. Google, the first to alert Intel to the vulnerability, released preliminary details about the chip flaws and added a full report is still to come. The company said it updated its public cloud service and has been checking customer services. The latest version of the Chrome operating system has been patched, according to CNBC. "We used our VM Live Migration technology to perform the updates with no user impact, no forced maintenance windows and no required restarts," Google's Vice President of engineering Ben Treynor Sloss wrote in a blog post.
3. Microsoft is working to patch its cloud services as well as current and older versions of Windows for servers and desktops. It has also updated its two web browsers, Edge and Internet Explorer. "We're aware of this industry-wide issue and have been working closely with chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations to protect our customers," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote CNBC in an email. "We are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and have also released security updates to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from Intel, Arm, and AMD."
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