Unlike what it previously announced, Intel has reported that the serious “Specter” security issue will not be fixed in all of its microprocessors. Many of the excluded belong to rather old and hardly still in use model lines such as: Bloomfield, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown, Jasper Forest, Penryn, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale and Yorkfield. Intel says it has given up due to some technical complications, due to the limited diffusion of those processors by now outdated and the fact that they are almost always used in “closed systems”, therefore less subject to cyber attacks. Intel is probably right, but cybersecurity experts still point out that some of the processor lines involved are relatively recent, dating back to 2015 for example. Intel has been working for months to fix “Specter” and another serious security issue ( Meltdown) which affects a large part of its processors: they depend on how the chips were designed and can be circumvented, in part, through a software update which in some cases can lead to a slowdown of computers. The company has also received a lot of criticism for having reacted not promptly.
