If they did this just to short AMD and make money, that's indeed quite shady, and they go through all the trouble of hiding their real intentions because they a

If they did this just to short AMD and make money, that's indeed quite shady, and they go through all the trouble of hiding their real intentions because they also know it's super-shady. That said, unless the whole "research" is fake, I wonder if we could be seeing more such tactics in the future against tech companies, and whether or not that would give them an immense incentive to care about security - or risk getting ruined in the stock market. Honestly, such a huge incentive may actually be needed to get most companies to get about security. The money equation needs to make sense to them. Right now most think investing the absolute minim amount in security for compliance reasons is already too much money wasted on security. If this were to become common, I think maximizing security would actually start looking quite profitable to them. I mean, this research is already saying there are some backdoors in AMD's chips. I imagine in the future, companies would be way more careful about allowing backdoors in their products, whether intentionally or by mistake, if they knew they risked getting their stock crushed. So yeah I just like to play with this idea a little bit. So far this revelation doesn't seem to have had the "desired" effect by the backers of the research, though, but we'll see. I just want to know whether or not the research is real, so I'll wait for AMD's confirmation. I assume AMD wouldn't try to lie to us about it, because there are now probably at least a dozen security teams trying to pick AMD's chips apart, so the flaws would be found soon enough, if real.