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(Yicai Global) Jan. 5 -- Intel Corp. is releasing updates to protect devices against Meltdown and Spectre, two major chip vulnerabilities that it acknowledged this week.
The security flaws will affect any devices using chips Intel made over the past 20 years, including those belonging to major cloud computing firms, allowing hackers to gain access to private information.
The company has already issued updates for most of its processors brought in over the past five years, and will have released patches for more than 90 percent of those products by the end of next week, it said in a statement yesterday.
Chief Executive Brian Krzanich acknowledged the loopholes but claimed he wasn't previously aware of the issue. He did, however, sell of 890,000 Intel shares in November last year, leaving him with 250,000 -- the minimum amount the company requires its CEO to hold.
"There are two main reasons Intel is acknowledging the flaws now," Dr. Meng Kui, of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told Yicai Global. "One is that it takes a long time to fix the issue, and the second is that as so many devices are affected, reporting the vulnerabilities would alert attackers to them."