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Forbes Technology Council

In the last several months, the tech world has been buzzing about Meltdown and Spectre, extremely serious hardware security flaws that could potentially affect anyone with a computer. If a malicious program exploits these vulnerabilities, it can access data stored in the memory of other programs running on your machine, including passwords, private emails, photos and other sensitive data.

Although security patches have been released to protect against Meltdown and Spectre exploits, this major issue has everyone paying closer attention to their device security, especially in the tech industry. We asked members of Forbes Technology Council how the news of these vulnerabilities might impact their field.

1. Worse Performance Per Dollar 

Secure cloud resources can become more expensive after the recent news of Meltdown and Spectre. This means that we can expect a worse performance per dollar and may need to invest more to get the same performance we are accustomed to but hopefully with increased security. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

2. A Greater Need To Evaluate Software Performance 

The Meltdown and Spectre exploits are consequences of technical design that led to higher performance. The patches quickly delivered by the software companies are known to slow down systems, but in most cases, the end users won’t notice. However, if you make software dependent upon system performance, any impact to performance needs to be evaluated. – Tim Maliyil, AlertBoot

3. Overall Slower Devices (Until The Next Generation Comes Out) 

The Spectre and Meltdown flaws have exposed a huge security hole in a large number of platforms, from mobile to laptops to desktops and data centers in the cloud. Some of the companies have come out with fixes for this flaw, but they slow down your computer. All computers are taking a performance hit and will have to wait for next-generation chips where it will be fixed in hardware. – Naresh Soni, Tsunami ARVR

4. Future Exploitation Of Unpatched Hardware 

Major platforms were patched quickly, and the resulting performance hit will increase infrastructure costs in the short term. But the biggest problem is legacy hardware that remains unpatched. Millions of mobile devices and servers are unlikely to be patched any time soon, and criminals will likely be exploiting Spectre and Meltdown for years to come. – Vik Patel, Nexcess

5. Increased Cloud Adoption To Shift The Infrastructure Burden 

Attackers are able to exploit these critical security gaps and access sensitive data and applications, and the fallout is severe. Today, many organizations are moving away from managing their own data centers and adopting cloud, effectively shifting the infrastructure security burden to AWS, Microsoft and others that have processes in place to quickly patch their systems. – Rich Campagna, Bitglass

6. Less Trust In Future Technology 

Given the rise of tech in people’s lives, it is important for us to make them trust tech. Especially, when we’re asking people to use tech for things like self-driving cars (where their lives are at stake if tech fails) and smart homes (where a faulty piece of tech can make your private life not so private). Will people stop using all computers? No. Will they be more reluctant trying new technology? Probably. – Vikram Joshi, pulsd