The attacks exploiting the vulnerabilities have been labeled Fallout, RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load), ZombieLoad.,[2][3][4] and ZombieLoad 2.

They exploit the possibility of reading data buffers found between different parts of the processor.

[9] On 14 May 2019, various groups of security researchers, amongst others from Austria's Graz University of Technology, Belgium's Catholic University of Leuven, and Netherlands' Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in a disclosure coordinated with Intel, published the discovery of the MDS vulnerabilities in Intel microprocessors, which they named Fallout, RIDL and ZombieLoad.

[1] On 12 November 2019, a new variant of the ZombieLoad attack, called Transactional Asynchronous Abort, was disclosed.

[10][11] According to varying reports, Intel processors dating back to 2011[12] or 2008[1] are affected, and the fixes may be associated with a performance drop.