{"id":306382,"date":"2019-05-16T07:51:31","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T05:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=306382"},"modified":"2019-05-16T07:52:02","modified_gmt":"2019-05-16T05:52:02","slug":"intel-vulnerability-fix-cripples-performance-on-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/306382-intel-vulnerability-fix-cripples-performance-on-mac.html","title":{"rendered":"Intel vulnerability fix cripples performance on Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intel recently released a security patch to protect against a new set of vulnerabilities called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

These vulnerabilities enable the ZombieLoad exploit<\/a><\/strong>, which threatens the security of Intel’s CPU platform.<\/p>\n

Intel released microcode updates to patch this vulnerability, and Apple has outlined its own process for Mac users to ensure their devices are protected.<\/p>\n

Apple states on its website<\/strong><\/a> that all modern Mac users are potentially vulnerable to this attack, and details how they can secure their devices against any potential exploit.<\/p>\n

Full mitigation requires disabling hyper-threading, although this has a significant performance impact on the user’s device.<\/p>\n

In its own testing, Apple found that disabling this feature showed a reduction in performance of up to 40%, adding that the severity of this performance hit will vary based on model, configuration, and workload.<\/p>\n

To enable full mitigation for MDS vulnerabilities, Mac users must restart their devices in macOS Recovery and navigate to the Terminal app from the Utilities menu.<\/p>\n

In the Terminal, users must enter the following commands:<\/p>\n

nvram boot-args=”cwae=2″<\/p>\n

nvram SMTDisable=%01<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Users can then restart their device, after which hyper-threading will be disabled and they will no longer be vulnerable to MDS exploits.<\/p>\n

Now read: ZombieLoad exploit lets hackers steal data from Intel CPUs<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intel released microcode updates to patch MDS vulnerabilities, and Apple has outlined its own process for Mac users to ensure their devices are protected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341028,"featured_media":299180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[605,131,59038,59024],"class_list":["post-306382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-apple","tag-intel","tag-mds","tag-zombieload"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341028"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}