Intel's rival, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is facing problems similar to its competitor right now, as researchers discover a supposed critical security flaw in AMD's central processing units (CPUs) not unlike the Spectre and Meltdown flaws of Intel.
Apparently, there were a total of 13 flaws found in AMD CPUs that could let hackers install malicious software (malware) into the users' PCs. This was discovered in AMD's Ryzen CPUs and could also let hackers access sensitive data remotely and even stealthily. It can be recalled that Intel faced a similar and disastrous security flaw back in January, which led to a lot of negative repercussions.
Meanwhile, the said researcher institution calls itself CTS-Labs and is actually a security company based in Israel. Like the flaw in Intel, they claim that the problem also lies in AMD Ryzen CPUs' design structure in which supposedly secure parts and features of the processors can be used to create a security breach to the hackers' advantage.
However, a lot of critics in the PC tech community have called out the said Israeli group on their findings since they apparently did not follow the standard procedures for such incidents. The usual custom was for researchers to inform the company first of their CPU security flaws at least one month before the announcement is made public, however, CTS-Labs did not disclose their findings to AMD much less gave them time to fix the issue before it gets announced.
By comparison, Google gave Intel six months to fix their own processor security flaws, which was only made public during the start of 2018. Basically, AMD got blindsided and is now facing a public relations (PR) nightmare in addition to fixing its own CPU security issue instead of only worrying about the latter first. This has drawn the ire of a lot of tech pundits, particularly Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system.
AMD, on the other hand, has ensured everyone that they are now hard at work in investigating the issue and stated that: "At AMD, security is a top priority and we are continually working to ensure the safety of our users as new risks arise. We are investigating this report, which we just received, to understand the methodology and merit of the findings."
