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Multiple Suits Filed Against AMD and Intel Over Spectre and Meltdown


Guest_Jim_*

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One can hardly be surprised by this news as a total of six lawsuits have been filed against AMD and Intel combined. Four of these suits are against Intel with the other two against AMD. The two against AMD are both concerning if AMD and/or any of its executives and officers misled people about the impact of the vulnerabilities, thereby committing fraud to keep stock values high. The Rosen Law Firm v AMD is currently asking for those who purchased AMD stock between February 21, 2017 and January 11, 2018 to join its class action suit, though a class has not been certified yet. The Pomerantz Law Firm v AMD suit is a bit more specific in its claims by pointing out that days after AMD had stated there was "near zero risk" to the second variant of Spectre, the company "acknowledged" its CPUs are susceptible to it and have made available optional microcode patches to protect against it.

Turning to the Intel suits, they come from Brower Piven, Levi & Korsinsky, LLP, Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP, and Bronstein, Gewritz & Grossmand, LLC. All four of these share similar language by alleging Intel CPUs contain a fundamental design flaw making them vulnerable, the fixes ton the vulnerability can slow the processors' operation by 5-30%, and that public statements made by the company were materially false and misleading. The Brower Piven and Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP filings also mention reports of a sale of stock options by Intel's CEO.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything comes of these suits, and I could see it potentially impact how significant security vulnerabilities are handled in the industry. When the Spectre and Meltdown issues were discovered, various companies were informed, so patches and other mitigation methods could be developed, but the information was kept private and away from the public. While one can make the argument this is to prevent malicious actors from using the information to attack still vulnerable systems, these lawsuits appear to make the argument this information needs to be disclosed to the shareholders earlier. This is going to be an interesting year for the computer industry.

Source: WCCFtech



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