Intel Corporation experts discovered the CVE-2022-40982 vulnerability, known as Crash, and slowed down users’ computers around the world to fix it. The drop impacts Intel’s consumer and server processors, from the Skylake family to Rocket Lake. Therefore, most users of Intel chips faced a hypothetical threat, which is guaranteed not to affect only the owners of the latest models.

As a result, Intel engineers have released an update that slows the performance of the tech giant’s processors.

The reason for such results was the research of the specialists of the Phoronix publication, which covered the topic of the Linux operating system and software for this environment. Employees of the resource’s testing laboratory conducted tests and compared the performance of the chips. It turned out that the update can reduce the power of computers with Intel processors by up to 39 percent.

So, during the Xeon Platinum 8380 and Xeon Gold 6226R tests, performance dropped from 6 percent in various tests, Cascade Lake – 33 percent, Core i7-1165G7 – from 11 percent to 39 percent.

The experts of the publication concluded that users will have to choose to refuse or install the update that fixes the vulnerability, but sacrifice speed. At the beginning of August, Google engineer Daniel Moghimi said that millions of computers with Intel processors are at risk due to the vulnerability. According to Mohimi, hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal passwords, private messages, encryption keys and other sensitive data.