Intel Addresses the Elephant in the Room

Today at CES in Las Vegas we attended a large event hosted by Intel. This event is a celebration of everything Intel has been doing and also the innovative ways that Intel has been working. The evening however had to start by addressing the largest issue that has hit computer processors of all time.

A vulnerability was recently reported on which impacted Intel processors, it essentially meant that a hacker could navigate into the memory of your computer and read data as it is being handled by your processor cores.

When Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO, took the stage he had one option really; address the issue. When talking about Spectre, Brian started by acknowledging all the Intel partners like Amazon and Apple for immediately responding publicly with patches or consumer notices, particularly their “willingness to act”.

Brian then went on to confirm that “no information that these exploits have been used to access customer data” assuring us that we shouldn’t feel afraid to use our computers. His advice to all owners of Intel based products though “is to apply updates as soon as they become available”.

In regards to having this issue resolved entirely, “Intel will update 90% of the previous five years of products in a week”, this is a large call, over the course of five years Intel has been inside millions of products, it’s great to hear how fast they have acted on this. Brian further went on to assure partners that “Intel will work with the industry to minimise the impact” these updates and patches have on customers.

[ces18]