As I first reported to you on January 5th, computer chips manufactured by Intel, Arm and AMD essential to the operation of your computer have recently been disclosed to have serious flaws that have been called Spectre and Meltdown that make the computers using these chips vulnerable to being hacked such that all of your data could be stolen. The problem was discovered last year, but the problem has existed for more than twenty years, however, it was not publicly disclosed until just a few weeks ago. To date, it does not appear that these vulnerabilities have been exploited by hackers, however, now that they have been publicly identified it has been a race between computer companies to develop software updates to patch the flaws and hackers seeking to capitalize on the flaws. Yesterday, Apple issued new security patches for both of these defects. If you use Apple products, you should download these updates immediately.
TIPS
Here is a link from the Department of Homeland Security to the latest Apple updates.
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2018/01/23/Apple-Releases-Multiple-Security-Updates
As always, it is important to update all of your software as soon as security updates become available in order avoid threats to the security of your data. When downloading security updates it is important to make sure that you are downloading legitimate security patches from legitimate sources and not malware disguised by scammers as legitimate security updates.