The hole affects its Core and Xeon processors and while Intel said that the methods have not been seen in real-world exploits,  this further underscores the need for everyone to adhere to security best practices.

Intel also released updates to address the bug and said new updates coupled those released earlier in the year will reduce the risk for users, including personal computer clients and data centres.  Given that previous patches have ground older machines to a slowing halt, god knows what the effect of these later patches will be.

In January, the company came under scrutiny after security researchers disclosed flaws that they said could let hackers steal sensitive information from nearly every modern computing device containing chips from Intel Corp, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) and ARM Holdings.

AMD said it was not impacted by the new flaws disclosed by Intel, although to be fair it said that last time and it was.