SAN FRANCISCO, May 14 (Xinhua) -- Intel on Tuesday discloses a new security flaw in its processors that could allow potential attackers to steal sensitive data from Intel-powered computers or even cloud servers.
The world's top chipmaker called the new group of vulnerabilities embedded in the architecture of computer hardware as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS).
"MDS is a sub-class of previously disclosed speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities and is comprised of four related techniques," said Intel.
The security bug is capable of taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of Intel chips when a speculative execution is performed by the processors to improve chip performance.
Intel said the flaw was discovered by its internal researchers and partners, which was also reported by other researchers from other companies.
The security flaw was the most recent revelation of Intel chip bugs since two notorious hardware viruses involving Intel processors, nicknamed Spectre and Meltdown, caused panic among computer users last year.
Some security experts said the new chip bug could affect almost all computers powered by Intel chips dating back to 2011.
Despite its potential threat, Intel said "there are no reports of any real-world exploits of these vulnerabilities" because the actual exploitation of MDS is very complex.
The company noted that it has addressed the hardware problem in its processors, including a fix to its future processors, with microcode updates.
Other tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft have also released security advisories on their respective websites to fix the problem on Tuesday.
