Spectre was indeed "announced" 5 months ago, but it was disclosed to Intel on June 1st 2017. That's over 16 months ago. See for example https://en.wikipedia.or

Spectre was indeed "announced" 5 months ago, but it was disclosed to Intel on June 1st 2017. That's over 16 months ago. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit... : > Spectre proper was discovered independently by Jann Horn from Google's Project Zero and Paul Kocher in collaboration with Daniel Genkin, Mike Hamburg, Moritz Lipp and Yuval Yarom. Microsoft Vulnerability Research extended it to browsers' JavaScript JIT engines.[4][20] It was made public in conjunction with another vulnerability, Meltdown, on January 3, 2018, after the affected hardware vendors had already been made aware of the issue on June 1, 2017. There were also stories they were aware of the problem even before, and basically ignored it. If you check out that history section, there were multiple public presentations about the feasibility of an attack for years before the practical exploit was discovered. The only way Intel didn't at least suspect it is if it was very sloppy, or didn't care at all.