Microsoft says security patches slowing down PCs, servers

Reuters 

By Eric Auchard

(Reuters) - Corp said on Tuesday the patches released to guard against Meltdown and Spectre security threats slowed down some personal computers and servers, with systems running on older

O> processors seeing a noticeable decrease in performance.

The security updates also froze some computers running chipsets, said in a blog post, citing customer complaints.

Shares in Intel, which reiterated on Tuesday that it saw no sign of significant slowdown in computers, fell 1.4 percent, while those of fell nearly 4 percent.

shares have gained nearly 20 percent in the last week as investors speculated that the chipmaker could wrest market share from Intel, whose chips were most exposed to the security flaws.

"We (and others in the industry) had learned of this vulnerability under nondisclosure agreement several months ago and immediately began developing engineering mitigations and updating our cloud infrastructure," executive wrote in a blog post. (http://bit.ly/2mj6f3Q)

Security researchers disclosed the flaws on Jan. 3 that affected nearly every modern computing from Intel, and

Meltdown and Spectre are two memory corruption flaws that could allow hackers to bypass and other to steal passwords or keys on most types of computers, phones and cloud-based servers.

Intel said a typical home and PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing digital photos. (http://intel.ly/2FiL0Hk)

The chipmaker said last week that fixes for security issues in its would not slow down computers, rebuffing concerns that the flaws would significantly reduce performance.

Rival had also played down the threat, saying its products were at "zero risk" from the Meltdown flaw, but that one variant of the Spectre bug could be resolved by from vendors such as

But on Tuesday said it was aware of an issue with some older-generation processors following the installation of a security update that was published over the weekend.

said it was working with to resolve the issues.

also released an updated version of its software on Monday to fix the security flaw.

(Reporting by in Frankfurt and Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by and Shounak Dasgupta)

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Wed, January 10 2018. 01:31 IST