As with Spectre and Meltdown, the vulnerability takes advantage of speculative execution, a function that anticipates and executes instructions before any commands are received, thereby increasing CPU performance.
Researchers from security firm Bitdefender discovered and reported the newly disclosed side-channel attack to Intel 12 months ago. Attackers could use it to steal data from the system kernel, potentially exposing encryption keys, passwords, session tokens, private chats, and more.
