Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities, green light at class action against Intel

Intel will also have won its European battle on the AMD case, seeing – at least for the moment – the fine of just over 1 billion canceled, but the Santa Clara house has many other disadvantages and one of these concerns the Spectre and Meltdown CPU failures, a problem that has affected the whole industry a little, but undoubtedly Intel processors predominantly.

The grain emerged publicly in all its gravity in early 2018, but in reality the discovery of vulnerabilities, capable of exposing sensitive information using a mechanism designed to make CPUs work faster (let’s simplify), dates back to August of the year. first. In the period from discovery to public disclosure, several months have passed in which Intel, as if nothing had happened, continued to sell its CPUs.

And it is precisely on this fact that a class action action in the United States is based, which Oregon District Court Judge Michael Simon has given the green light in recent days. To announce the site The Register. The main complaint from the plaintiffs is that at the time of purchase they expected a CPU with certain performance, while Intel – already aware of the flaws – knew it would have to issue patches that would reduce performance.

The countless lawsuits filed by Intel CPU companies and purchasers have been condensed into a single proceeding that has been filed twice. On the third try, the case was accepted by Judge Simon. According to the documentation, the lawsuit is limited to those who bought a computer after September 1, 2017 as Intel was previously unaware of the vulnerabilities in its processors.

According to the plaintiffs, Intel would have chosen not to disclose the problem so as not to burn off sales during the Christmas period. The thesis of Intel and the whole hi-tech industry (we must not forget that everyone knew: Google, Microsoft, AMD, etc.) is different: the disclosure of the flaw was made only after developing mitigations capable of one part to safeguard data security, on the other to contain the drop in performance as much as possible. Announcing to the world the discovery of the two serious vulnerabilities without countermeasures in place could have led to worse consequences.

The case is not yet destined to go to trial as there are several procedural steps to be completed. For Intel, in the absence of further procedural moves that could also invalidate this attempt, the easiest way to go would be to settle with the parties involved, thus giving compensation of an entity that, in court, could become much larger.

“We are pleased with the court’s decision,” said Christopher Seeger, the plaintiffs’ principal attorney. “We look forward to pursuing this litigation on behalf of consumers and businesses who are left with slower and less secure computers due to defects found in Intel processors.”