Yup, a lot of folks at the office enjoy skimming hacker news, ars technica etc. The number of people capable of actually signing microcode even in a company of 100,000+ is pretty darn small though.

You'd actually be surprised about how much effort goes into hardening things against attacks like those these days (timing attacks, differential power analysis etc). There's a lot of interesting work around on the best ways of mitigating those risks.