Security News
Chipmaker Intel is reporting a memory bug impacting microprocessor firmware used in "Hundreds" of products. "Potential security vulnerabilities in some Intel Optane SSD and Intel Optane SSD Data Center products may allow escalation of privilege, denial of service or information disclosure," reported Intel.
Uncle Sam will dole out up to $10 million for vital information on each of six Russian GRU officers linked to the Kremlin-backed Sandworm gang, who, according to the Feds, have plotted to carry out destructive cyber-attacks against American critical infrastructure. It's hoped the money, offered via the US Department of State's Rewards for Justice program, will lead to the snaring of the following men said to be Russian intelligence officers: Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko, Sergey Vladimirovich Detistov, Pavel Valeryevich Frolov, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Artem Valeryevich Ochichenko, and Petr Nikolayevich Pliskin.
An Intel study finds that businesses are eager for cybersecurity and are keen to see how security can be baked into devices. Hardware-assisted security uses hardware extensions and components to support the security of higher-level machine layers, from the BIOS up through desktop applications.
US chipmaker Intel announced Tuesday night that it had suspended all business operations in Russia, joining tech other companies who pulled out of the country due to the invasion of Ukraine. Intel had already suspended all shipments to customers in Russia and Belarus last month after the US government issued sweeping sanctions that prevented the export of technology to the countries.
Intel this month published an advisory to address a novel Spectre v2 vulnerability in its processors that can be exploited by malware to steal data from memory that should otherwise be off limits. Spectre is one of two closely related chip architecture blunders, details of which emerged in 2018; the other being Meltdown that The Register first highlighted.
Researchers have disclosed a new technique that could be used to circumvent existing hardware mitigations in modern processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm and stage speculative execution attacks such as Spectre to leak sensitive information from host memory.Attacks like Spectre are designed to break the isolation between different applications by taking advantage of an optimization technique called speculative execution in CPU hardware implementations to trick programs into accessing arbitrary locations in memory and thus leak their secrets.
Security researchers have found new a new way to bypass existing hardware-based defenses for speculative execution in modern computer processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm. Today, the three CPU manufacturers have published advisories accompanied by mitigation updates and security recommendations to tackle recently discovered issues that allow leaking of sensitive information despite isolation-based protections.
Google is buying pre-eminent threat intel firm Mandiant for $5.4bn, the two companies announced this morning. "Cyber security is a mission, and we believe it's one of the most important of our generation. Google Cloud shares our mission-driven culture to bring security to every organization," said Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant in a canned statement.
While Ukraine is yet to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the country has been accepted as a contributing participant to the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. Although this does not make Ukraine a NATO member, it will likely tighten collaboration and allow it to gain access to NATO member nations' cyber-expertise and share its own.
Microsoft's attempt to put its homegrown Pluton security processor architecture into third-party Windows 11 PCs is right now more work-in-progress than the slam dunk its publicity would have you believe. Pluton is the software giant's move to define a level of security that should be baked into microprocessors that run its Windows OS. Pluton implementations are supposed to securely store and safeguard encryption keys, credentials, and other sensitive information, such as biometric data, within the processor package, making it difficult for miscreants to extract this info.