Intel is finally confirming that its computer processors are vulnerable to an additional variant of Spectre, the nasty security vulnerability that affects nearly every CPU currently in devices and in the marketplace.

It's been nearly a month since The Register first revealed that every single major processor in devices is subject to a series of harrowing security vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown. And in light of news that Intel informed foreign interests of the vulnerabilities before the US government, and that Microsoft is pulling its latest patch from Intel due to some heinous bugs, we thought we'd revisit the saga and what you can (and cannot) do to protect your data.

Worried about protecting yourself from the security exploit that is Spectre? Well if you already downloaded Intel's update patching the flaw, be prepared to download another one soon.

Earlier this month Intel released a patch for Spectre and Meltdown, the devastating vulnerabilities affecting every modern Intel processor. The patch wound up causing another problem: it led some PCs to reboot unexpectedly. Now, Intel says it's identified a fix for its fix, according to Intel executive Navin Shenoy.

This morning in a press release, Intel announced that it has "issued firmware updates for 90 per cent of Intel CPUs introduced in the past five years." But it's possible the flurry of patches is just beginning.

Ah, processor bugs! Spectre and Meltdown are a big deal, affecting a wide range of hardware and software configurations. So all of us, basically. What's interesting is that this isn't the first time speculative execution has popped up as a problem -- back in 2005, the PowerPC chip in the Xbox 360 had a similar issue.

Security researchers revealed disastrous flaws in processors manufactured by Intel and other companies this week. The vulnerabilities, which were discovered by Google's Project Zero and nicknamed Meltdown and Spectre, can cause data to leak from kernel memory -- which is really not ideal since the kernel is central to operating systems and handles a bunch of sensitive processes.