Spectre is back to ruin our week.

Because existing chip mitigations were apparently far too effective, MIT researchers uncovered the TONTOU attack to bypass Spectre defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs. Devices running Zen 2 processors and affected silicon were left vulnerable as timer interrupts obligingly reopened the branch predictor poisoning window. Safeguarding our hardware against this clever flaw requires waiting for microcode updates while accepting that chip performance will inevitably plummet once again. It is comforting to know that silicon hardware vulnerabilities will easily outlive my IT career.