https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846840/intel-arm-processor-flaw-chipocalypse-windows-macos-linux

All week, the tech world has been piecing through rumors of a potentially catastrophic flaw in an entire generation of processors — but with all developers subject to a non-disclosure agreement, there were few hard facts to go on.

Now, new details have emerged on how severe and far reaching the vulnerability truly is. ZDNet is reporting that two critical vulnerabilities — dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre” — affect nearly every device made in the past 20 years. The vulnerabilities allow an attacker to compromise the privileged memory of a processor by exploiting the way processes run in parallel. The result, one researcher told ZDNet, is that "an attacker might be able to steal any data on the system.”