San Francisco—A report that Intel Corp. chips are vulnerable to hackers raised concerns about the company’s main products and brand. All computers with Intel chips from the past 10 years appear to be affected, the report said, and patches to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows and Apple Inc.’s OS X operating systems will be required. Flaws in the designs of microprocessors, which go through rigorous testing and verification, are usually easily fixed by patches in the code that they use to communicate with the rest of the computer. But if the error can’t be fixed easily in software, it could be necessary to redesign the chip, which can be extremely costly and time consuming. “They need to get ahead of this and try to contain any of the damage to customers as well to the brand.”

Source: thestar January 03, 2018 18:22 UTC