“The two attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, can be executed on desktop machines, laptops, mobile devices, and in cloud environments. That means an attacker could steal information from other cloud customers’ systems, for example.
Meltdown allows user applications to pilfer information from the operating system memory, as well a secret information of other programs. ‘If your computer has a vulnerable processor and runs an unpatched operating system, it is not safe to work with sensitive information without the chance of leaking the information. This applies both to personal computers as well as cloud infrastructure,’ the researchers wrote in an FAQ about the attacks. “
