Qualcomm’s recently appointed President Christino R Amon said that Spectre and Meltdown flaws reported last week may show the least impact on the mobile industry. The reason, the security updates released so far have managed to mitigate and resolve most of the issues.
Although, there were rumors that the said vulnerabilities will affect most modern computing systems and mobile devices powered by Intel, Arm or AMD. The situation in practice seems to be not that serious as reported.
At the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018, Qualcomm President Amon clarified some of the issues related to the impact of Spectre and Meltdown flaws on smartphones. During the brief conversation, he said that since the fixes are available already, the impact of the flaws in the mobile ecosystem will almost be nil.
His clarification stands true as the mobile ecosystem operates in a different way than traditional PCs. In this case, mobile users update their handsets with the latest security updates far more regularly, than PC users. So, the impact of the flaws may be minimal or may not show signs at all in the mobile world.
Note- Qualcomm supplies a majority of processors powering most smartphones today. So, the perspective of the Qualcomm boss on this issue cannot be taken lightly.
Meanwhile, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who was issuing keynotes at the CES 2018, said that 90% of his company’s processors manufactured in last 5 years will receive patches within a week. And the remaining will receive a fix by the end of this month.
Krazanich said that Intel has not received any info that these exploits were used by hackers to launch cyber attacks.
