Spectre

Spectre is the British English spelling of specter, meaning a ghost or spirit. In folklore and popular culture, a spectre is an incorporeal being or haunting, often used as a literary device to evoke fear or suspense. The term also appears in titles and organization names.

In the James Bond franchise, SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a fictional global criminal organization led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It first appeared in Fleming's Thunderball and became a central antagonist faction in later novels and films; the 2015 film Spectre centers on Bond confronting this organization.

In computing, Spectre refers to a class of security vulnerabilities disclosed in 2018 that affect many modern processors. The vulnerabilities exploit speculative execution and memory side channels to read privileged data from other processes. Variants include bounds-check bypass and indirect-branch prediction attacks. Mitigations involve software updates, kernel hardening, and processor microcode fixes.