Hello people.
What I am about to share with you is to be taken with a grain of salt.
Your absorption of this information is best suited to security related research and development.
You may or may not have known but since 1995 Intel has been re introducing simular CPU technologies with faster clock speeds.
It comes down to a singular data pipeline that other cpu manufacturers have been adopting as well to suppliment support for intel coding.
When a security threat is announced historically due to a very nasty vigourous worm, trojan or virus malware the user simply updates their software including anti malware tools such as anti virus, Etc.
Spectre works on such a low level it isn't easily detectable and literally installs itself in cpu resource memory. (CMOS ram or cpu buffer)
Even the newest cpu's manufactured at time of writing cannot guarantee 100-% protection.
But the branch of CPU's it is designed to infect is basically cpu's within 5 to 15 years ago.
It is a very hard to craft vulnerability and is regarded as a government level hack of civilian networks.
That would explain why we were never told but suffered.
All they had to do is pay a group of some of the worlds most taleented hackers and masquerade as a hacking team.
Sometimes jouralists and government orgaisations would hijack buisness partners of facebook google youtube and social media networks poisoning web browser script code to get inside the deepest parts of your pc.
Due to the fact memory provides the passwords for encrypted data it doesn't take long for the scrupilous hacker to get web API keys, bank axccount passwords, crypto currency passphrases, website passwords navy military secrets etc. A little list of what to collect and transmit to the hacker is included.
The first thing to do when a person suspects an infection is don't bother to shutdown switch the power off. Whilst the power is off remove the clock battery and short the cmos reset pins leaving in that configuration for 10 minutes. This eliminates cmos and cpu buffer infections. If it has infected your systems bios that can mean either a re flash or replace of the bios hardware chip and or software. You will be able to tell aa bios infection where booting of your pc will show post screen only and will not do anything else. Although it looks damaged it is a data checksum faliure reversible with a bootable flash drive with bios data or cdrom. In dual bios configurations short out the power pins on the ios so the backup bios kicks in. As soon as the backup bios boots release the bios from shorting and allow the backup to update your bios. Then you can einstall the latest BIOS patch.
Hardware firewalls are by far better than software ones.
Home users have UPNP Routers for broadand internet.
It is wise to run a server, however, from internet sharing of what is called an internet gateway pc.
Special versions of linux come for such pc's that stop almost all nasties affecting your home or buisness peripherals.
In actual fact they compliment your routers abilities.
Other forms of Spectre like activity include middlemen attacks.
Such attacks include stalking your online activity until a vulnerability is exploited.
One exploit I suffered was back in 2014 when i downloaded a DVD Burner drive patch.
It worked flawlessly on a 2007 dvd burner to use modern burnable discs.
However, I noticed the green indicator illuminate with no disc inside the burner several days later like it was receiving a firmware update. I had recently visited not so popular internet games and gamling places.
It didn't show any signs of hacking activity until i refreshed my desktop software. It was consistantly trying to communiate to something that wasn't there in my system anymore thus causing a slowdown to system performance.
Scripts are known to be able to force burners to burn holes in discs but not program to spy.
Protection from middleman attacks can be as simple as changing the network ip DNS server and again connect through a gateway pc and UPNP router. Most often middleman attacks are from poisoning DNS servers as many accomplished internet crypto miners and gamers seek the fastest DNS server than their ISP supplies. To add to middleman effectiveness ISP's are found to not implement IP V6 DNS resolving to save money thus provide users with cheaper internet most commonly found on wireless GSM networks. That is ok unless your ISP hasn't got an NAT policy (doesn't allow game servers to protect from rootkits)
It appears if anyone wants a mission critical security protoco they must avoid AMD and INTEL aas much as possible. old generation APPLE and SUN microsystems CPU['s do not use the affected pipelines making it very difficult for hacks to occur.
In summary considering the sophisication of Spectre to actually run successfully it seems more of a front for corporates to secure larger market sales of newer age systems based on government knowledge.
There are hacker groups who do single out platforms to attack and is always after the productline has just gone out of warranty. Also some computer users will use drivers from a system bundle on another brand hardware because they have same part numbers and replace generic windows drivers. They are fine but to the middleman the non generic driver setup sticks out and becomes an unique opportunity for attack.
Using an internet gateway machine allows you to filter internet feeds without the filters being attacked by scripts. Iffor example peerblock is running on a internet gateway the script from firefox cannot attack it from another pc connected to it via LAN.