Researchers warn that a bug in AMD’s chips would allow attackers to root into some of the most privileged portions of a computer—and that it has persisted in the company’s processors for decades.
If you have kernel access you can already do almost everything so a vulnerability on top of that isn’t that bad since no one should have kernel access to your computer
It means that a malicious actor would already need to have hacked your computer quite deeply through some other vulnerability (or social engineering) before they could take advantage of this one. But I don’t agree with another commenter here that this is a “nothingburger”: this vulnerability enables such a hacker to leave undetectable malware that you just can’t remove from the computer even if you replace everything but the motherboard. That’s significant, particularly for anyone who might be a target of cyber-espionage.
Requires kernel-level access. Also AMD is “releasing mitigations,” so is it “unfixable?”
I think they meant it as “once infected may be impossible to disinfect.” But it sure doesn’t read that way at first glance.
Did they change it? Because now it says “Allows Deep, Virtually Unfixable Infections” and that seems to say exactly what you are.
Surely one could use the same exploit to restore the original boot code as the malware used to corrupt it
If you have kernel access you can already do almost everything so a vulnerability on top of that isn’t that bad since no one should have kernel access to your computer
You mean like Crowdstrike?
MostAll antivirus software runs at kernel levelWhich is precisely the reason you shouldn’t use an AV apart from the one packaged with Windows
“They’re going for the kernel!”
"Colonel who?"
Cancer. Brain. Brain cancer.
What does that mean to the rest of us?
It means that a malicious actor would already need to have hacked your computer quite deeply through some other vulnerability (or social engineering) before they could take advantage of this one. But I don’t agree with another commenter here that this is a “nothingburger”: this vulnerability enables such a hacker to leave undetectable malware that you just can’t remove from the computer even if you replace everything but the motherboard. That’s significant, particularly for anyone who might be a target of cyber-espionage.
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