New Interrupt Injection Attack Can Bypass Spectre v2 Defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs

Back Thehackernews

New Interrupt Injection Attack Can Bypass Spectre v2 Defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs

Thehackernews •[email protected] (The Hacker News) • August 6, 2026

Share: View original

Learn how 300 enterprise leaders are managing AI-driven open-source risk, remediation debt, and governance at scale.

Learn how to govern risk, secure AI-built software, and keep control as development moves at machine speed.

The full story

This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.

New TONTOU Attack Exploits Spectre v2 Defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs MIT researchers have unveiled a new speculative execution attack named TONTOU, which bypasses mitigations against Spectre v2 on Intel and AMD processors. The attack exploits a timing vulnerability in the post-neutralization window of branch predictors, allowing unprivileged code to re-poison these predictors and leak sensitive data, such as Linux password hashes. The researchers demonstrated the attack on AMD Zen 2 and Intel Cascade Lake Refresh processors. The method involves scheduling high-frequency timer interrupts to redirect control flow during critical execution phases. An AMD kernel fix is available, but many systems remain vulnerable until updates are applied. The attack highlights weaknesses in existing Spectre mitigations and poses a significant risk to Linux systems. The researchers will present their findings at DEF CON 34. 4 sources 71

Extracted Entities

Companies (2)

Vulnerabilities (1)