Insider trading? - Intel CEO sells of his stock before releasing news about CPU vulnerability

Image source: CNBC.com

The "newly" discovered vulnerabilities in most CPU's

By now most of us have heard the news about the security flaws uncovered in both Intel and AMD CPUs affecting an indespicable amount of computers world wide, on both a personal level as well as on a business level.

If you haven't heard about the two vulnerabilities by now, here's a quick summary;

The meltdown flaw lets cyber criminals directly access the computer's core memory, bypassing the tough security measures provided by the hardware and applications.

Spectre is similar, but rather than bypassing the hardware, the flaw lets hackers trick the applications into giving up sensitive data.

As if that last part wasn't bad enough

New updates to this story sprung late this week when it was known that Intel's CEO, Brian Krzanich sold off a massive amount of his Intel shares November 29th, just days before the news about the vulnerabilites went public.

You might think to yourself: "That might just be a coincidence". Well, I can tell you that seems to not be the case.

Several other technology companies, including Google had known about this security vulnerability since mid-2017 and had even alerted Intel about the flaw as early as June 2017. But Intel decided not to do anything at that time.

How many stocks did Brian sell of? Just the usual amount?

Brian Krzanich did not just sell off a normal amount of stocks, in fact, he sold in total 889 878 stocks, leaving him him the bare minimum of 250 000 stocks needed to remain his seat as CEO of Intel.

And if that wasn't a big enough red flag for you, he initiated the sale 30th of October, just in time for the stocks to be liquidated before the vulnerability news hit the public.

This might have saved Brian a whooping minimum of $1,414,906.02, as Intel's stock went down 3.4%. (Or $1.59 per stock if you would).

You might ask yourself: "Isn't this called insider trading?". Well, the Intel excecutives were already prepared for that question, and had set in place fall-back measures;

To avoid charges of trading on insider knowledge, executives often put in place plans that automatically sell a portion of their stock holdings or exercise some of their options on a pre-determined schedule, typically referred to as Rule 10b5-1(c) trading plans.

According to an SEC filing, the holdings that Krzanich sold in November - 245,743 shares of stock he owned outright and 644,135 shares he got from exercising his options - were divested under just such a trading plan.

Okay then.. But what will happen next?

When it comes to the vulnerabilities, the "Meltdown" vulnerability only affects Intel CPUs and can be patched in exchange for a 30% loss in computing power.

But "Spectre" affects all Intel, AMD and ARM processors, and you won't find many computers containing a CPU other from those. Though there are no fixes for "Spectre" yet, the entire computer industry has started working, looking for an "easy fix".

Several companies has already rolled out their own software patches to stop exploits using these vulnerabilities, so I would suggest checking your software to see which has an new update avalible.

As for Brian, what will happen to him? Probably not much, as usual with top executives, but I guess we'll just have to sit tight and see what happens the next few months.

Data sources

Excerpts / Quotes from: Financial Review