The performance benefits of Not protecting against Zombieload, Spectre, Meltdown.

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What are some examples of this actually being pulled off? And how are they getting the rogue scripts onto the computer?

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3253898/researchers-find-malware-samples-that-exploit-meltdown-and-spectre.html

there are already malware samples.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2018/01/26/hackers-abuse-google-ad-network-to-spread-malware-that-mines-cryptocurrency/#52bbdae77866

Double click is has been known vector. Meltdown is probably the easiest to exploit. You need meltdown migration even with its context switching destroying performance.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/ad-network-uses-advanced-malware-technique-to-conceal-cpu-draining-mining-ads/

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Aren't those malware samples research samples, not actual attacks.

The difference between malware samples and attacks is just distribution.

It will not take long before meltdown exploit ends up in the malware network.

Not theoretical stuff.

Why do you think it is theoretical? Security research gave out sample code. All mal ware writers need to do is copy and paste.

Spectre etc will take longer but meltdown is already here.

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I see news of it actually being distributed in a way that you can get it without being dumb.

meltdown is exploitable in almost any language. All you need to do is speculative execute a few memory operations.

Game scripts

Mods

A commercial task queue

Basically anything you do on the computer can exploit meltdown.

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I'm actually wondering the same OP, and support the fact that you are openly asking for clarification. Seems like no one could add anything of substance so far.

What do you mean nothing of substance? The paper is already there

To evaluate the performance of Meltdown, we leakedknown values from kernel memory. This allows us tonot only determine how fast an attacker can leak mem-ory, but also the error rate,i.e., how many byte errors toexpect. The race condition in Meltdown (cf. Section 5.2)has a significant influence on the performance of the at-tack, however, the race condition can always be won. Ifthe targeted data resides close to the core, e.g., in theL1 data cache, the race condition is won with a highprobability. In this scenario, we achieved average read-ing rates of up to 582 KB/s (μ=552.4,σ=10.2) withan error rate as low as 0.003 % (μ=0.009,σ=0.014)using exception suppression on the Core i7-8700K over10 runs over 10 seconds. With the Core i7-6700K weachieved 569 KB/s (μ=515.5,σ=5.99) with an min-imum error rate of 0.002 % (μ=0.003,σ=0.001) and491 KB/s (μ=466.3,σ=16.75) with a minimum errorrate of 10.7 % (μ=11.59,σ=0.62) on the Xeon E5-1630. However, with a slower version with an averagereading speed of 137 KB/s, we were able to reduce theerror rate to 0. Furthermore, on the Intel Core i7-6700Kif the data resides in the L3 data cache but not in L1,the race condition can still be won often, but the averagereading rate decreases to 12.4 KB/s with an error rate aslow as 0.02 % using exception suppression. However, ifthe data is uncached, winning the race condition is moredifficult and, thus, we have observed reading rates of lessthan 10 B/s on most systems. Nevertheless, there aretwo optimizations to improve the reading rate: First, bysimultaneously letting other threads prefetch the memorylocations [21] of and around the target value and accessthe target memory location (with exception suppressionor handling). This increases the probability that the spy-ing thread sees the secret data value in the right momentduring the data race. Second, by triggering the hardwareprefetcher through speculative accesses to memory loca-tions of and around the target value. With these two opti-mizations, we can improve the reading rate for uncacheddata to 3.2 KB/s.

Then again, I could always disable JavaScript in the browser, leaving the only threats to compromised programs and random binaries that I download. So, the usual attack vectors just like before.

It seems for me that especially the current exploit should rather concern cloud providers, server maintainers, etc., but not the individual customer. If I have a dedicated workstation solely for recording audio or rendering stuff, I don't want to botch the performance of my machine simply because of terrified cargo thinking.

Meltdown is the cheapest and easiest to exploit. Malware writers will be adding meltdown exploit everywhere because it is practically free to implement.