Israeli cybersecurity research firm CTS Labs in its report said the attackers would need administrative access to exploit the vulnerabilities. This is a bit like saying if a burglar has disabled the burglar alarm and you left the door unlocked, he can pull the phone out of the wall and prevent you calling the police.

“Any attacker gaining unauthorised administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research”, the chipmaker said on Tuesday.

The release of the news is widely considered suspect by many in the IT industry. Two days before the research was made public, short selling of AMD’s stock increased by about 15 million shares, according to S3 Partners, a financial analytics firm.

CTS executives later told Reuters that they shared their findings with some clients who pay the firm for proprietary research on vulnerabilities in computer hardware. So this might have been the reason for the short selling.

At the time CTS claimed that AMD was doomed as it was suffering from an issue as bad as the one that blighted Intel recently.  Security experts, however, dismissed that.