Intel's Microcode Update for Spectre Makes a Comeback in Ubuntu's Repositories

After it's been pulled from Ubuntu's repositories in late January at Intel's request due to serious hardware issues reported by numerous users, Inte's microcode update to mitigate the Spectre security vulnerability makes a comeback.

On January 22, 2018, Canonical replaced the Intel microcode firmware versioned 20180108 with the older 20170707 release at Intel's request, thus no longer protecting users' computers against the Spectre security vulnerability that could allow a local attacker to expose sensitive information from kernel memory.

"Jann Horn discovered that microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and branch prediction may allow unauthorized memory reads via side-channel attacks. This flaw is known as Spectre. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory (read more)

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