"Last week in light of the Spectre disclosure. AMD believed they were at 'near zero risk' to Variant Two / Branch Target Injection. But now the company confirmed last night that's not the case: they are at least potentially vulnerable."
I mean no offense to the author, but that is sort of a dense interpretation. The whole point of AMD's updated statement was to counter the public perception of increased vulnerability versus their original statement which appears to be what the author is claiming. The rest of the tech media that I've observed so far seems to indicate that understanding, contrary to what was reported here.
AMD originally said that they were theoretically vulnerable even though the exploit had not been demonstrated to work so far. That's what "near zero risk" means as opposed to "zero risk". That remains the case today as well. They've released a microcode update because "near zero" is not "zero". Of course they were going to work on mitigating the possibility before someone could figure out how to exploit it. It's not contrary to their initial statement and does not indicate an upwardly revised risk assessment.
I mean no offense to the author, but that is sort of a dense interpretation. The whole point of AMD's updated statement was to counter the public perception of increased vulnerability versus their original statement which appears to be what the author is claiming. The rest of the tech media that I've observed so far seems to indicate that understanding, contrary to what was reported here.
AMD originally said that they were theoretically vulnerable even though the exploit had not been demonstrated to work so far. That's what "near zero risk" means as opposed to "zero risk". That remains the case today as well. They've released a microcode update because "near zero" is not "zero". Of course they were going to work on mitigating the possibility before someone could figure out how to exploit it. It's not contrary to their initial statement and does not indicate an upwardly revised risk assessment.
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