On **August 6, 2026**, **MIT CSAIL** researchers unveiled at **Black Hat USA** a new CPU attack that bypasses **Spectre v2** fixes on both **Intel** and **AMD** processors. TONTOU exploits the gap between branch predictor neutralization and its actual use, extracting `/etc/shadow` at 5.47 bytes per second with 91.97% accuracy.

Linux 7.2 Release Candidate 5 ships with over 35% of its patch volume in networking drivers — a post-conference backlog catch-up. The stable kernel is targeted for August 16, 2026. Sysadmins should schedule their validation windows now.