PROCESSORS
Spectre is back
Researchers find new line of attack that beats defences.
T hree years ago, the tech world was rocked by the discovery of severe security flaws in billions of processors, dubbed Spectre, which affected PCs around the world. Since then, a number of mitigations have been created to protect against the vulnerabilities. However, researchers from the University of Virginia and University of California, San Diego have found a new line of attack that appears to successful bypass all current Spectre protections. If correct, this means that once again billions of computers, as well as servers, smartphones and anything else that uses affected CPUs, is at risk.