A class action lawsuit has been filed against Intel over its handling of speculative execution vulnerabilities found in its CPUs, particularly the recently disclosed attack method named Downfall.
A 112-page class action complaint was filed this week by plaintiffs represented by Bathaee Dunne. News of a Bathaee Dunne-led lawsuit against Intel over the Downfall vulnerability emerged in late August, when the law firm announced that it was
preparing to file a complaint.
The plaintiffs say the Intel CPUs they have purchased are “defective” because they are either left vulnerable to cyberattacks or they have significantly slower performance due to the vulnerability fixes made available by the chip giant.
The complaint says Intel has known about speculative execution vulnerabilities in its processors since 2018, when cybersecurity researchers disclosed the existence of two attack methods named Meltdown and Spectre.
These types of attacks typically allow an attacker who has access to the targeted system — and in some cases remotely — to bypass security protections and obtain sensitive information such as passwords and encryption keys from memory. However, conducting an attack is often not an easy task and there are no public reports about such flaws being exploited in the wild.
