Security Issue in YOUR Computer - Meltdown Spectre

First of all, what is Meltdown and Spectre?
Meltdown and Spectre are two security holes in most Intel CPUs and some of the AMD CPUs.

But how are they working, you may ask. Every processor (the "heart" of your computer) tries to figure out what you may do next and already calculates everything necessary. So for example if you navigate to a folder on your harddrive your processor already reads a file, which you didn't even open, or you don't even have the permission to open. And thats where Meltdown and Spectre comes in: When somebody exploits those security issues they can read those performed actions by the proccessor and find out what your computer thinks you are doing next. That is a big problem if you think of for example somthing like the password-manager in most browsers.

How can it be exploited?
It can be exploited by every programm even by websites you visit

Is it really that bad?
No it is not, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox already have fixes or are working on them, which make it a lot harder to exploit those issues. And you have to keep in mind it is not somthing you can exploit easiely, it is pretty complicated to use. So for now there are no known attacks.

What can you do?
Most importantly as always: keep your programms and your operating system up to date. If you are using a linux, make sure, you get the latest kernel as soon as possible. For Windows there is also a patch, but it is only applied if your antivirus system allows the installation, so keep that up to date.

Conclusion
Above mentioned patches by the softwareproducts are not the solution, they make it only harder to perform an attack. But if you keep your OS and your software up to date, you should be pretty safe. The effects of those problems will most likely affect us not only today but also the next few years. So what do we learn form it? Lets all buy a raspberry pi, because it as an other processor-architecture and it is not affected. Some even say Meltdown and Spectre is a built-in backdoor from the NSA :)...

Thats all for now, thanks for reading