Intel tells companies to stop installing patch for security flaw
We reported a while back about Meltdown and Spectre, the two flaws potentially affected most chips used in computers going back as far as 20 years.
We further advised to hold off on the patches and fixes until it became clear as to how taxing they were going to be. As it turns out, a fair number of computers were trashed by the “fix”.
The patches “may introduce higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior,” wrote Navin Shenoy, general manager for Intel’s data center group in a blog posting Monday.
Organizations that have installed the patches noticed a 12% slowdown of their devices, on average, according to Spiceworks. They also report that 29% of companies with more than 1,000 employees expected to spend 80+ hours dealing with the flaws. 18% of companies reported spending more than $50k to apply the patches and dealing with the issues created by said patches.
In other words… maybe you want to hold off on patching.