Torvalds Calls Intel's Patch Garbage

Intel's woes are not going away. After releasing the patches for Spectre/Meltdown, the company is asking users to stop installing these patches until a better version is out.

"We recommend that OEMs, cloud service providers, system manufacturers, software vendors, and end users stop deployment of current versions on specific platforms," Navin Shenoy, executive vice president of Intel wrote in an announcement, "as they may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior."

Red Hat has already reverted the patches that the companies earlier released for the RHEL family of products, after reports of rebooting problems.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, reserves the harshest words for Intel. "… I really don't want to see these garbage patches just mindlessly sent around," wrote Torvalds on the LKML mailing list.

Though not everyone on the mailing list thought it was such a bad thing. One maintainer said, "Certainly it's a nasty hack, but hey – the world was on fire and in the end we didn't have to just turn the data centres off and go back to goat farming, so it's not all bad."

Another maintainer chimed in and said, "As a hack for existing CPUs, it's just about tolerable – as long as it can die entirely by the next generation."

Torvalds didn't buy either argument. "That's part of the big problem here. The speculation control cpuid stuff shows that Intel actually seems to plan on doing the right thing for Meltdown (the main question being when). Which is not a huge surprise, since it should be easy to fix, and it's a really honking big hole to drive through. Not doing the right thing for Meltdown would be completely unacceptable," said Torvalds. "So the IBRS garbage implies that Intel is not planning on doing the right thing for the indirect branch speculation. Honestly, that's completely unacceptable too."

More than 2,000 WordPress Sites Infected by Malware

If you are a WordPress admin, you need to check if your site is infected by the infamous cloudflare.solutions malware.

A few month ago, researchers at Sucuri, a web security company, discovered two infections related to cloudflare.solutions. The company reports that the malware and attack are back.

The malware is a bigger threat to WordPress-powered sites that offer e-commerce services because it is designed to steal payment details. "If hackers manage to steal the admin credentials, they can just log into the site without relying on a flaw to break into the site," wrote The Hacker News.

Although the new attack is not as widespread as the original, the return of the malware does show that website admins didn't protect their sites after the first attack. It's very likely that most WordPress admins may not even be aware of the problem.

According to The Hacker News, "More than 2,000 WordPress websites have once again been found infected with a piece of crypto-mining malware that not only steals the resources of visitors' computers to mine digital currencies but also logs visitors' every keystroke."

"To clean up a website that has been compromised with this infection, you'll need to remove the malicious code from the theme's functions.php, scan the wp_posts table for possible injections, change all WordPress passwords(!), and update all server software, including third-party themes and plugins," wrote Sucuri in a blog post.

If you are a WordPress admin, you might want to try the Sucuri plugin to check how to clean your website of any infected code.