Adam Levitt, co-founding partner of DiCello Levitt, has been appointed by United States District Judge Michael H. Simon of the District of Oregon to the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in In re Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation. With this most recent appointment, Adam will represent the interests of purchasers of Intel processors and computers containing those processors across the country related to serious security defects.
In the summer of 2017, a research team led by Google’s Project Zero discovered security issues contained within most processors manufactured by Intel over the last decade that could exploit the processors’ “speculative execution” technology to allow unauthorized access into a computer system’s memory. The two main security flaws, “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” are found in nearly all of Intel’s x86 processors manufactured since 1995, and can be abused by hackers, putting private and sensitive information at risk. While Intel and other third parties have been scrambling to develop patches to mitigate the harm caused by the security issues, those patches have been shown to slow down processor speeds by as much as 30%, affecting consumers, servers, and institutions throughout the United States.
The scope of the security risk related to the speculative execution technology is breathtaking. Some media outlets have reported that virtually every CPU manufactured in the last 10-20 years containing Intel processors is detrimentally affected. Intel’s failure to remedy the defect, as well as its misrepresentation of faster processor speeds, has, to date, resulted in the filing of more than 30 separate class action lawsuits across the United States, which have been consolidated in the District of Oregon.
“We believe that Intel took a shortcut when it developed its processors, sacrificing security for speed,” Adam noted. “With data breaches and threat environments affecting consumers’ daily lives, purchasers are entitled to know when their most sensitive data is at risk. I’m honored to represent the many millions of consumers across the country who were harmed by Intel’s actions.”