AMD and Intel have been hit with a spate of lawsuits over the increasingly catastrophic Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting their CPUs. Various lawsuits are at play here, such as this one, have now appeared and state, “The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company’s business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) a fundamental security flaw in AMD’s processor chips renders them susceptible to hacking; and (ii) as a result, AMD’s public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.”
AMD may have spoken too soon when they said “Due to differences in AMD’s architecture, we believe there is a near zero risk to AMD processors at this time”. We’ll just have to wait and see. It may also hurt their case if during the discovery process the decision of Microsoft to halt distribution of Spectre patches to AMD hardware is revealed to have been relevant to the case.
AMD isn’t alone here, Intel are also being targeted by class action suits as a result of stock purchasers taking action from the huge losses thay suffered due to the decline of stock prices from these exploits.
As expected both Intel and AMD have called these allegations and the suits they are based on without merit. It’s unknown what other lawsuits may come to fruition as a result of the Spectre/Meltdown exploits, we’ll keep you posted.