Security researchers have discovered a new set of flaws in Intel processors that could leave users exposed to cyber-attacks akin to those caused by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.
The attack variants include Fallout, RIDL and ZombieLoad, the last of which appears to be the most critical and operates by exploiting a design flaw in Intel chips to leak sensitive user data.
Chips made by Advanced Micro Devices and ARM Holdings are not affected by this latest vulnerability.
However, it impacts 'almost every computer' with an Intel processor going back as early as 2011, according to TechCrunch.
Scroll down for video
Researchers have discovered a new set of flaws in Intel processors that could leave users exposed to cyber-attacks akin to those caused by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities
Users can check to see if they've been affected using an online tool created by the researchers.
The flaws were discovered by a team of researchers from Austrian university TU Graz, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Michigan, the University of Adelaide, KU Leuven in Belgium, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Germany's Saarland University and a number of security firms.
Intel also announced the vulnerabilities in a blog post published today, referring to the set as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS).
'Under certain conditions, MDS provides a program the potential means to read data that program otherwise would not be able to see,' the company explained.
'Practical exploitation of MDS is a very complex undertaking. MDS does not, by itself, provide an attacker with a way to choose the data that is leaked.'
Intel said it will ship future processors with the necessary hardware changes to address these vulnerabilities.
The chip giant added that it has already begun rolling out updates to operating system and hypervisor software as a fix for the flaws.
The attack variants include Fallout, RIDL and ZombieLoad, the last of which appears to be the most critical and operates by exploiting a design flaw in Intel chips to leak sensitive user data
ZombieLoad takes advantage of a design flaw in Intel chips that's similar to what caused the Meltdown and Spectre flaws.
It exploits a process called 'speculative execution,' wherein a processor works to predict what operations or data an application
