Intel revealed that the company is facing 32 lawsuits over security flaws

The company Intel has revealed that they’re facing 32 lawsuits over Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws. Intel in a SEC filing today said, “As of February 15, 2018, 30 customer class action lawsuits and two securities class action lawsuits have been filed.” The customer class action lawsuits are “seeking monetary damages and equitable relief”. While the securities lawsuits “allege that Intel and certain officers violated securities laws by making statements about Intel’s products and internal controls that were revealed to be false or misleading by the disclosure of the security vulnerabilities.”

Also, the company is facing action from three shareholders who have each filed shareholder derivative actions.

The allege certain board members and officers at Intel have “failed to take action in relation to alleged insider trading.” It appears to be related to the concerns raised over Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s stock sales.

It’s not a surprise that Intel is facing lawsuits and the company expects more to come in the future. The Meltdown and Spectre security flaws have helped reveal fundamental issues. These issues are with the processor designs over the past 20 years. Also, the software updates to protect the PCs have had noticeable performance impacts. Intel’s response to the security flaws lacked transparency at first. And Microsoft was the one who revealed the true extent of the performance issues.

The company had a very hard time patching its processors for the Spectre flaw. Its initial updates caused reboots on some machines. Microsoft was also forced to issue an emergency Windows update to disable Intel’s buggy Spectre fixes. Intel has now resumed issuing Skylake firmware updates. The company is still continuing the test updates for Broadwell, Haswell and other processors. They’re also extending its bug bounty program to ensure it discovers this type of security problems a lot in the future.