The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities are bi-products of optimisation techniques designed to increase the performance of modern processors.
These techniques are called "out-of-order" and "speculative" execution. They allow the processor to make better use of time it would have to spend waiting unnecessarily before executing the next instruction to pre-compute further results which may or may not be used in the execution flow.
These pre-computed results, if not used, are discarded – but, as researchers have shown, there are side-effects left by such precomputation which are not disposed of thoroughly and can sometimes be leaked to the potential attacker.
As stated by the authors of the papers describing the vulnerabilities, there are theoretical ways antivirus could detect the problem. However, detection would have an extremely negative impact on the device’s performance and significantly influence user experience; it would be a less effective approach than prevention.
Eset recommends that its users keep track of any related patches for their systems and apply them as soon as possible.
While Eset protects against potential malware infection, you should also take these steps to secure your computers and data:
