The U.S. Government wants Answers from Apple, Intel, AMD & others over the Delayed Disclosure of Meltdown & Spectre
In a November security update to customers, Apple stated that "For our customers' protection, Apple doesn't disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until an investigation has occurred and patches or releases are available." With that said, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee stated today that it has sent letters to the CEOs of several major technology companies about their agreement to delay disclosing information about security flaws Meltdown and Spectre that has rocked the industry. Specifically, The congressional committee sent letters to the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, AMD, Arm, Google, Intel and Microsoft.
According to CNBC, "The letters raise questions about why the companies agreed to delay disclosure, and seek to find out whether the involved companies considered how the delay might hurt other companies who were not kept in the loop.
Additionally, the letters bring up the matter of when the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team was informed.
"While we acknowledge that critical vulnerabilities such as these create challenging tradeoffs between disclosure and secrecy, as premature disclosure may give malicious actors time to exploit the vulnerabilities before mitigations are developed and deployed, we believe that this situation has shown the need for additional scrutiny regarding multi-party coordinated vulnerability disclosures," representatives Greg Walden, Marsha Blackburn, Robert Latta and Gregg Harper wrote in their letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook. More.
Intel replied by email to CNBC by stated that they appreciate the questions from the Energy and Commerce Committee and welcome the opportunity to continue their dialogue with Congress on these important issues.
On Sunday Patently Apple posted the first story of a Class Action being filed against Apple earlier this month regarding ARM processors that are used in all iDevices having security flaws due to Meltdown and Spectre.
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