Gigabyte Safeguards Users From Speculative Execution Vulnerability

Gigabyte promptly implemented safety and precautionary measures aligned with Intel’s response to safeguard customers against security vulnerabilities on systems utilizing Speculative Execution and indirect branch prediction.

The newly released BIOS updates from GIGABYTE integrate the latest Intel advised CPU Microcode versions to mitigate issues potentially caused by the security vulnerability. Customers who have purchased a GIGABYTE board are strongly recommended to visit the GIGABYTE official website immediately for the latest BIOS updates. Please refer to the following micro link for the list of available BIOS updates by models (currently offers updates for models that support 6th/7th/8th generation Intel® Core™ processors and X99/X299 platform): https://www.gigabyte.com/MicroSite/481/intel-sa-00088.html

The security vulnerability arises from a new side-channel analysis method developed by external researchers that gathers information by observing the physical behavior of certain processing techniques that are common to modern computing platforms. Malicious code using this method and running locally on a normally operating platform could infer data values from memory. Based on GIGABYTE and Intel’s current assessment of these exploits we believe that they do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data. 

After being notified about this industry-wide potential security issue, GIGABYTE is working with our silicon providers in developing solutions to mitigate these issues as soon as reasonably possible. Updated software and firmware mitigations should be available in the next few days and will continue to be released over the next few weeks.

For more information on the Intel security vulnerabilities, please visit the Intel Security Center website for further details: https://security-center.intel.com/advisory.aspx?intelid=INTEL-SA-00088&languageid=en-fr