Intel Chips In Danger
Security fault in many intel x86 chips!
Security researcher Chris Domas has been quite busy and his work has paid off, depends on who you ask but he must be happy. He found an a fault in the x86 architecture which would allow hackers to install a rootkit on a firmware level. For you who don’t know what any of that means, just know that’s real bad news for any of you affected.
The exploit can be found on all Intel manufactured CPU’s produced from 1997 to 2010 (pretty much anything pre sandy-bridge). The hack exploits a feature that Intel added in the late 90’s. This was shown at the hacking conference BlackHat.
Now lets talk about the things that we can do with this exploit (but if you try and of this be ethical). You can wipe the UEFI (modern day equivalent of the BIOS), infect the operating system after a clean install, and many more scary things that can be pretty much undetected. The hack exploits the hardware’s trust. Unlike most hacks which exploit vulnerabilities in code that can be easily changed this is in hardware which is impossible to be changed as a on OTA update.
As scary as this attack is it is also quite difficult to deploy. To utilise this you will already have kernel access. Even though this flaw would make it impossible to use to compromise a system, you can use it to keep your hack undetected. This is bad news for governments and small to medium business’ which probably use these cpu’s and are the likely recipients of attacks.
Are you scared?
