Happy New Year to all our readers.

We start off the new year on an interesting note. If you use a computer and don’t live under a rock, you have probably been inundated by news about Meltdown and Spectre. This flaw which was first found in Intel processors, affects nearly every modern computing device. The security researchers have posted proof-of-concept videos on Youtube. While some patches have been developed, there are reports of problems and the available patches are not a panacea.

No weekly update would be complete without mentioning the latest breaches. Popular teen fashion chain, Forever 21, reported that hackers were able to acquire customers’ payment information. Plus, Ancestry.com revealed that approximately 300,000 users of their rootsweb.com site were compromised. As of today, Rootsweb.com is still unavailable.

This week also saw reports of software vulnerabilities. There is a flaw in most major browsers that let third-party scripts access saved passwords. The main concern is that the flaw could potentially let hackers steal saved usernames and passwords from the browsers without human interaction. New Year’s day also brings us a possible 0day, as a researcher released details of a MacOS vulnerability.