AMD Blindsided By Vulnerability Report, Hit Job Speculations Circulate

When it was revealed that Intel’s CPUs came with dangerous vulnerabilities that are still being addressed to this day, the company was at least given time to look into the matter before the subject was made public. This was not the case with AMD, which was blindsided by allegations of security flaws. The act of publishing the report without warning the company first has since resulted in speculations of a hit job.

The allegations came via a digital security firm called CTS-Labs, which Extreme Tech notes is not exactly a well-known entity. CTS recently filed a report that contains 13 security issues that are supposedly found in AMD’s products. If it wasn’t for the fact that the company was not notified of these vulnerabilities before the report was published, this case would have been treated with less suspicion.

As it is, accusations of this kind need to be dealt with seriously. If the security flaws do exist, AMD will need to deal with them accordingly. The unorthodox method of CTS does not change that.

On the other hand, many publications can’t help but point out the suspicious nature of this development, especially with regards to how the security firm appears to be intent on spreading fear instead of actually solving the problem. The whole point to filing vulnerability reports after notifying the companies involved about it is to give them time to come up with a solution. This simply didn’t happen in this case.

In an attempt to defend its actions, the security firm spoke with Tom’s Hardware and explained that their reason for going against industry norms was because they didn’t think AMD could fix the problems soon enough. CTS is basically justifying its actions by saying that it would have taken months or even years to find a solution to the security flaws and it didn’t want to wait that long to publish the report.