The names Downfall, Inception, Meltdown and Spectre might evoke the names of Bond villains, but they describe something almost as insidious: They are all central processing unit-based security vulnerabilities that have been uncovered in the past several years.

Each of them — the first two most recently and the last two harking back to 2018 — involves very specific attacks on hardware-level commands of various chips made or designed by Intel Corp., Arm Ltd. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. All have required or will require patching with operating system updates and chip firmware updates. My story for SiliconANGLE goes into the details of each one and how they can be mitigated.