🟠 High | Source: GCP Compute Engine Security Bulletins
Intel has disclosed a speculative execution vulnerability affecting Cascade Lake and Ice Lake processors, which impacts Google Cloud’s infrastructure. Google has already applied server-side mitigations across its fleet, so no immediate customer action is required. Further OS-level mitigations addressing the Indirect Target Selection (ITS) vulnerability will be rolled out by Intel OEMs and OS vendors.
Security Architect’s Take: No immediate action is required as Google has patched the underlying infrastructure, but architects running long-lived VMs on 3rd generation or later hardware should monitor for OS-level patches from their guest OS vendors and plan maintenance windows to apply them promptly once available — particularly for workloads handling sensitive or multi-tenant data where speculative execution risks are most consequential.
Original advisory: GCP-2025-024