Protecting against Intel’s new L1TF speculation vulnerabilities

Intel recently announced a new security vulnerability called L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) that affects all modern Intel processors and the virtual machines running on them.

In short, the L1TF vulnerability in Intel processors can allow a savvy attacker to expose the level-1 cached data from another virtual machine running on the same host processor core as the attacker’s virtual machine.

Since Intel’s announcement of L1TF we have been testing and working on deploying mitigations to secure our platforms against L1TF. We anticipate completion of these efforts across our global footprint within a few weeks. If any of these efforts require service affecting changes, we will notify you directly in advance of those changes being implemented.

What steps should you take to protect your environment against L1TF?

You should ensure your operating system within your virtual machines is up-to-date with all available patches applied.

In closing, new vulnerabilities will always be discovered by researchers and vendors and Atlantic.Net will always work diligently to protect our customers and offload much of the burden of addressing these vulnerabilities.

We will update this post as more information becomes available.

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