Intel touts progress as shares fall
Intel says computer firms are making good progress patching a design flaw in its processors that has rocked the computer industry and put most of the world’s information at risk from hackers.
The fixes for the design flaw come with a cost.
Intel processors – which lie at the heart of most computers – are expected to run between 5 per cent and 30 per cent slower, with businesses and cloud computing services likely to take the biggest performance hit.
Intel said in a statement released yesterday morning, New Zealand time, that the company and its partners had made ‘‘significant progress’’ deploying software patches and firmware updates.
By the end of next week, Intel expected to have issued updates for ‘‘more than 90 per cent of processor products’’ it had launched within the past five years, it said.
Intel vice-president Stephen Smith said on Thursday that the fixes could slow some computer tasks by ‘‘30 per cent or more’’ but should not be significant ‘‘for the average computer user’’.
Intel has been approached for comment on whether New Zealand computer users could be entitled to compensation.
The company, software suppliers and data centre companies are involved in a race against time to patch their systems before hackers master the complex task of exploiting the fundamental flaw.
The design flaw affects all Intel processors sold for at least the past 10 years and Smith said on Thursday that it would probably be a few weeks ‘‘before the mitigations we have in mind will all be available to customers’’.
Amazon Web Services – the world’s largest cloud computing provider – said on Thursday that it expected to have patched all the servers in its EC2 cloud computing centres by Friday, but warned that ‘‘to be fully protected’’ customers would also have to patch their own operating systems.
New Zealand’s largest IT services firm, Datacom, declined to comment on its situation.
Intel has confirmed it was confidentially advised by Google of the design flaw in June last year. It has been working to address the issue since then.
The timing is a bad look for Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who sold most of his shares and options in Intel in December, in a scheme of scale that was reportedly arranged in October.
US reports said the sale netted Krzanich about US$25 million (NZ$35 million) and reduced his holding in Intel shares to the minimum allowed by the company.
The chip design discovery is the latest success for Google’s Project Zero research team, which was established in 2014 to try to identify security flaws before hackers.
Google’s researchers indicated the underlying flaw had implications for chips designed by other companies, including Intel’s smaller rival AMD and British company ARM, whose designs are widely used in smartphones.
Intel succeeded in halving a 6 per cent decline in its share price on Thursday after issuing a statement that characterised the issue as more of an industry problem, rather than one that was mainly specific to the US$200 billion firm.
However, investors appear not to be completely convinced.
Intel shares resumed their decline and fell 1.8 per cent to US$44.43 when trading closed on the Nasdaq exchange at 10am, New Zealand time, yesterday.
AMDshares built on their gains in the previous trading session, jumping almost 5 per cent to close at US$12.12.
Intel said it expected no financial impact on the company. But US analyst Bernstein has reportedly said it struggles to believe that Intel won’t face some sort of financial liability, adding that the issue seems much bigger than one that forced it to take a US$700m hit in 2011.