By Juha Saarinen on May 2, 2021 6:03AM Billions of computers vulnerable. Researchers at the universities of Virginia and California in the United States have devised new Spectre-style hardware attacks that make it possible to steal data when processors fetch commands from their micro-ops caches. The new vulnerability affects billions of computers and other devices worldwide, and the researchers say it will be much harder to fix than the speculative execution flaws discovered over the last few years. In their paper, I see dead µops: leaking secrets via Intel/AMD micro-op caches [pdf], the researchers present three attacks that break defences against the earlier discovered "Spectre" hardware flaws in processors' speculative execution mechanisms.