For this episode we have a new presenter for Lancom TV, Anna from our Marketing team. She sat down with a familiar face, our Technical Director Imran, to discuss everything you need to know in relation to the latest global cybersecurity scare - Spectre and Meltdown.
Click play and watch the 2 minute summary on what they are, and how they affect your business.
If you, like many businesses leaders, are wanting to increase they cybersecurity knowledge of your employees, download our free training guide 'Cybersecurity tips for employees' here, and take immediate action to protect your business.
Transcript:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Lancom TV. I know that you're usually used to seeing Priscila here, but today I'm taking her place. My name's Anna, and I work in the marketing department at Lancom, and we're back here with Imran, a familiar face for you.
Hello.
So today we're here to talk about a cybersecurity risk which has happened in the new year, which is Meltdown and Spectre.
Yeah.
Yeah. We've been getting a lot questions about it, and rightfully so. It affects every, nearly every device...
Yeah, it does.
...or computer on the planet, at the moment. So we're here to explain it a bit more to you.
So, my first question for you, Imran, what is Spectre and Meltdown?
To just give you a bit of history on how it was discovered in the first place. So, Google has a team of analysts, and it's called "Project Zero", And they set that up in 2014. The whole purpose of that team is to actually find zero-day attacks. So the point is, it's almost like a counter-terrorism unit. So, the idea is to actually find all these flaws before hackers and other people actually discover it, and make misuse of that information, and try to actually mitigate these flaws and risks before they are actually released to the public, as well as hackers or malicious people actually find that information and start misusing that.
I see.
So that's the background.
Cool. So how does this affect us as an end user?
Right. So, both Spectre and Meltdown, and Spectre in particular, can actually affect an end user, and the example that's been given, in theory, is that a hacker could actually potentially get sensitive information when you're browsing the web. An example given is that if you open up your browser, and you're browsing your bank site on one of the tabs, and if you open up another tab and that goes to a potentially malicious website, and if a hacker is running some malicious software on that, it could potentially access the information from your bank account.
So what can we do to prevent an attack happening to us ?
What I would recommend is to keep yourself updated with the operating system patches, software, as well as your hardware, firmware updates.
Okay, awesome. Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us about that, Imran.
Not a problem.
I hope you now feel more educated on Meltdown and Spectre.
Great.
See you.
See you guys next time. Bye.