Canonical Releases AMD Microcode Update for All Ubuntu Users to Fix Spectre V2

The security vulnerability affects all microprocessors that use branch prediction and speculative execution function, and it can allow unauthorized memory reads via side-channel attacks if the system isn’t patched. For example, a local attacker could use it to expose sensitive information, including kernel memory. To fix the issue, a processor microcode firmware update is required, and Canonical released today updated amd64-microcode packages for AMD CPUs on all of its supported Ubuntu Linux releases, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).