[slizard]

Wild guess / conspiracy theory: Intel, afraid of the damage to their image just made worse by diminished performance advantage compared to AMD )due to Meltdown), fearing long-term market loss, quickly found ways to tackle the issue by, instead of pedaling to regain trust, damaging a competitor's image. It seems like a reasonable long game to support and perhaps steer the disclosure of AMD vulnerabilities that CTS-labs had been investigating. Or maybe is was Intel investigating themselves, had some cards up their sleeves, but needed some other entity to do the public disclosure.

Other theories discussed here seem less far-fetched than the above, but in any case, it does smell funny.

[HelloNurse]

My guess is that some researcher found something and decided to maximize profits, scraping the bottom of the barrel of quasi-vulnerabilities, creatively exaggerating, and bringing in the lawyers, the financiers and the PR weasels needed to throw a scary web site and a misleading "white paper" at AMD. We'll see what CTS works on next.