Newly disclosed vulnerabilities highlight a concerning security trend…

An Article Review.

Over the winter, the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities called the security risk posed by hardware bugs to the attention of the public…as well as hackers and security researchers. In the months since, as a new article from TechCrunch details, four new major hardware vulnerabilities have been discovered–and those are just the ones that have been disclosed to the public.

Those four vulnerabilities are likely not the last to be discovered as researchers now focus their efforts on finding similar flaws in other consumer and commercial devices, similar to the flurry of activity following the highly publicized reports of vehicle on-board computer systems being vulnerable to attack. The article softens the notion that we may be in for another wave of exploits by mentioning how, thanks to the increased media attention, those vehicle-based vulnerabilities are rare…though it also points out that this is not much consolation to those who have already been hit.

The article closes by suggesting that the more permanent nature of physical hardware–and the flaws contained within–compared to software will possibly require new ways of thinking about security and addressing vulnerabilities. With organizations already facing lost time and money spent addressing Spectre and Meltdown, the people who come up with those new ways of thinking could find themselves richly rewarded.

Original article by Andrew Lohn writing for TechCrunch.