Many people are talking about the recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in modern processors. What exactly are Spectre and Meltdown?
Both vulnerabilities break through the fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system, which allows access to secrets in your computer memory and of your other programs. When these vulnerabilities attack, they can enable programs to bypass the CPU's built-in process isolation mechanism. This could result in a potential data leakage, which may include passwords and other sensitive data stored on your system.
Due to the nature of a cloud platform, these vulnerabilities are even more dangerous because resources are potentially shared across many tenants.
OwnBackup takes information security very seriously. We have already deployed Spectre and Meltdown Operating System (Linux Kernel) updates on all our instances. These updates were completed on January 9th in OwnBackup’s EMEA region and January 11th in OwnBackup’s APP1 and HIPAA1 regions. This unplanned maintenance was required in order to put these critical patches in place as soon as possible.
OwnBackup strives to be transparent about the operations and status of our service. Visit our status page anytime to see the latest uptime analytics and announcements. For more details on the exact timing of these Spectre and Meltdown updates, please visit our Status page.
OwnBackup’s service operations team continues to keep track of this and other information-security advisories and follows best-practices to ensure our systems are up-to-date with all relevant patches.
OwnBackup’s underlying infrastructure is managed on Amazon Web Services™ (AWS) or Microsoft Azure™. Both providers have information available about their Spectre and Meltwater updates. You can refer to AWS's announcement on their Security Bulletin page and Azure’s on their blog.
For more information about Meltdown and Spectre and how it impacts your accounts and devices outside of OwnBackup, please visit this Meltdown and Spectre FAQ page.
