MANILA, Philippines – Google on Thursday, January 11, said that it has already deployed the necessary patches for processor vulnerabilities Spectre and Meltdown last year, which do not negatively impact the performance of its cloud services. 

The security patches for Meltdown and a variant of Spectre were issued in September, reports Reuters. Later in December, Google issued another patch for Variant 2 of Spectre, which Google said was more difficult to fix without slowing systems down. 

Microsoft also released patches for the said vulnerabilities, but admitted that its patches for Spectre’s Variant 2 had slowed down some personal computers and servers. The performance hit was especially felt on computers and servers running on older Intel processors.

Intel itself will issue patches for 90% of its chips that are 5 years old or less by January 15. After the patches have been issued for the more recent chips, the processor giant said it will then focus on fixing the older chips. 

Meltdown and Spectre affect Intel, AMD, and ARM chips, and allow hackers to read information on a computer’s memory such as passwords and other sensitive data. To date, no severe hack or data leak has been linked to the vulnerabilites. 

The flaws were first reported on January 3 by researchers from Google’s Project Zero and other academic and industry research partners – although major tech firms have said that they’ve known the flaws some months back. – Rappler.com