(Newswire.net — January 7, 2018) –Intel is beginning to face complaints following the security vulnerabilities discovered in the company’s chips.
The media suggest that three lawsuits have been filed so far in the United States of America – in California, Oregon and Indiana. All three complaints focus on the fact that Intel postponed disclosing the existence of vulnerabilities even though the company had known for months of the issues.
Also, the tech giant is charged with reducing processor performance that is caused by subsequent security updates.
The Register reports that the slowdown of the computer can range anywhere from 5-30 percent, although Intel claims that the company’s solutions are highly dependent on the workload and that typical users will not notice them.
“The performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time,” the company’s statement reads.
Google, too, issued a similar statement in regard to their impact on the company’s own cloud servers.
Given that it is still early (security vulnerabilities have been disclosed only a few days ago), it is possible that Intel will face an even greater number of lawsuits around the world.
Intel recently announced that 90 percent of affected chips should be patched by the end of the week, while other companies have released updates to prevent the effects of Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
“By the end of next week, Intel plans to release updates to over 90% of processor products shipped over the past five years,” said an Intel spokesman.
While the patches may fix the Meltdown, it has been discovered that it is much more complicated for Specter rectification, and it is possible that this may require even certain hardware changes.
The hope remains that Intel has indeed found a software upgrade to make its processors immune.
Interestingly, Apple has not yet spoken about this situation, as it has been mentioned by several sources that MacOS 10.13.2 contains these vulnerabilities (or at least some of them). It is possible that Apple will officially announce the release of MacOS 10.13.3 updates in order to combat these issues.