Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said researchers at Google made Intel aware of a widespread security exploit "a while back," and the company is working on fixes that could start next week.

He said he's "relatively confident" that a leaked security issue has not been exploited, and that the industry has been working together for a couple of months to address it. Krzanich spoke to CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Wednesday.

"We've found no instances of anybody actually executing this exploit," he said, adding that the fixes being tested now will prevent future attacks from bad actors.

"I mean, it's very hard — we can't go out and check every system out there," he added. "But when you take a look at the difficulty it is to actually go and execute this exploit — you have to get access to the systems, and then access to the memory and operating system — we're fairly confident, given the checks we've done, that we haven't been able to identify an exploit yet."

Industry blog The Register reported this week that a patch for a serious security flaw in Intel chips could impact their performance.

Krzanich said the entire industry was planning to publish the data security issue once the fix was in place — but the issue leaked early.

"Why did it leak ahead of time? Somebody was doing some updates on a Linux kernel and they improperly posted that this was due to this flaw," Krzanich said. "That's why we're responding to it today."

The chipmaker and enterprise technology company endured . Shares closed more than 3 percent lower after the company said it was working to fix a security issue that also affected other chip companies.

The exploit has since been linked to "many different vendors' processors and operating systems," according to Intel.