The flaws have received the names Meltdown and Spectre, and both potentially allow hackers to steal personal data from computers, including mobile devices and cloud servers, without leaving a trace. Both holes could be exploited to get access data stored in the memory of other running programs. A practical example would be your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal emails, or business-critical documents.
If that isn’t bad enough, patching the issue might slow down the performance of a CPU by up to 35 percent (a realistic worst-case scenario). At the moment we’re running preliminary tests on Windows 10 covering storage, gaming and applications to see what the immediate effects are to the average user.