New Spectre v2 attack impacts Linux systems on Intel CPUs

Researchers from VUSec disclosed a new Spectre v2 variant (CVE-2024-2201) that leverages Branch History Injection to leak privileged memory on many Intel processors running Linux. They released InSpectreGadget, a symbolic-execution tool that identifies exploitable kernel gadgets and demonstrated a native exploit; vendors and distributions are issuing and evaluating mitigations (disabling unprivileged eBPF, enabling IBT/eIBRS, LFENCE insertion, etc.), but existing mitigations may be insufficient and configurations vary across platforms.