Meltdown / Spectre CPU vulnerabilities brought Intel 32 lawsuits in 1.5 months

Ever since the Meltdown / Spectre CPU vulnerabilities were made public in early January this year, the two major players on the PC processor market – Intel and AMD – have managed to stir quite an uproar within the IT&C community. Some of the more vocal denouncers have gone as far as taking legal action against the two companies, and, while AMD seems to have been implicated in only a few class-action suits initiated by shareholders, Intel got struck with no less than 30 customer lawsuits and 2 shareholder class-action suits in just one and a half months.

According to Intel’s annual SEC report, the 32 lawsuits originated in various countries around the world, not only in the US. The two shareholder lawsuits basically pit Intel shareholders and board members against Intel officers and other board members. Shareholders are accusing Intel company officers for violating securities laws “by making statements about Intel’s products and internal controls that were revealed to be false or misleading by the disclosure of the security vulnerabilities.” The main legal debate is presented by the fact that Intel had been notified on the CPU vulnerabilities as early as June 2017 by Google’s Project Zero researchers, while the general public learned about Meltdown / Spectre in early 2018.

In spite of all these lawsuits queuing up for Intel, the company is not really concerned about any serious losses for 2018, as there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the foundations of these litigations. Meanwhile, Intel has also announced that it will release hardware fixes with the upcoming CPU models.

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