Cybersecurity

`It Can't Be True.' Inside the Chip Industry's Meltdown

  • Technology titans work in secrecy for months to fix key flaws
  • Researchers uncover security holes too big to believe
The Mounting Concerns Over Intel's Chip Vulnerabilities

It was late November and former Intel Corp. engineer Thomas Prescher was enjoying beers and burgers with friends in Dresden, Germany, when the conversation turned, ominously, to semiconductors.

Months earlier, cybersecurity researcher Anders Fogh had posted a blog suggesting a possible way to hack into chips powering most of the world’s computers, and the friends spent part of the evening trying to make sense of it. The idea nagged at Prescher, so when he got home he fired up his desktop computer and set about putting the theory into practice. At 2 a.m., a breakthrough: he’d strung together code that reinforced Fogh’s idea and suggested there was something seriously wrong.