Security News

Rackspace has admitted a ransomware infection was to blame for the days-long email outage that disrupted services for customers. In its most recent update, posted at 0826 Eastern Time on Tuesday, Rackspace said it has now "Determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident," and has hired a "Leading cyber defense firm to investigate."

America's second-largest nonprofit healthcare org is suffering a security "Issue" that has diverted ambulances and shut down electronic records systems at hospitals around the country.CommonSpirit has yet to provide additional details about the cause of the issue, how many facilities were affected, whether any patient data was stolen in what may have been a cyberattack, and whether or not ransomware was involved, even following our prodding of the org.

The Register broke the Meltdown story on January 2, 2018, as Intel and those who confidentially reported the security vulnerability were preparing to disclose them. To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower.

This past year, the pain was felt in two significant ways: through the supply chain disruptions caused by COVID-19, and through the many security breaches that we saw in our key IT suppliers. Many organizations have been caught off guard by the pervasive and long lasting repercussions of the supply chain crunch from COVID-19, exacerbating other supply chain bottlenecks further downstream and causing headaches for consumers and missed revenue targets for major corporations.

Computer scientists at TU Dresden in Germany have found that AMD's Zen processor family is vulnerable to a data-bothering Meltdown-like attack after all. In a paper [PDF] titled "Transient Execution of Non-Canonical Accesses," released via ArXiv, Saidgani Musaev and Christof Fetzer analyzed AMD Zen+ and Zen 2 chips - namely the Epyc 7262, Ryzen 7 2700X, and the Threadripper 2990WX - and found that they were able to adversely manipulate the operation of the CPU cores.

Gruss and his colleagues discovered some of the biggest recent security snafus, including the Meltdown and Spectre microprocessor design flaws, a working Rowhammer exploit, attacks on Intel SGX including Plundervolt, and many more besides. The assistant professor also advanced his theory that as Moore's Law runs out, we'll use more and more systems with more and more processor and accelerator cores all interacting with each other, which means even more security risk.

Many processors made by Intel are vulnerable to a newly disclosed type of attack named Load Value Injection, but the chip maker has told customers that the attack is not very practical in real world environments. A variation of the LVI attack, dubbed Load Value Injection in the Line Fill Buffers, was also reported to Intel by researchers at Bitdefender.

Chipzilla's processors, already weighed down by defenses deployed against side-channel attacks over the past two years, could get slower still if they try to thwart this latest vulnerability: prototype compiler changes, for full mitigation, have produced performance reductions ranging from 2x to 19x. That's because LVI protection involves compiler and assembler updates that insert extra x86 instructions and replace problematic instructions with functionally equivalent but more verbose instruction sequences. "Being essentially a 'reverse Meltdown'-type attack, LVI abuses that a faulting or assisted load instruction executed within a victim domain does not always yield the expected result, but may instead transiently forward dummy values or data from various microarchitectural buffers."

Chipzilla's processors, already weighed down by defenses deployed against side-channel attacks over the past two years, could get slower still if they try to thwart this latest vulnerability: prototype compiler changes, for full mitigation, have produced performance reductions ranging from 2x to 19x. That's because LVI protection involves compiler and assembler updates that insert extra x86 instructions and replace problematic instructions with functionally equivalent but more verbose instruction sequences. "Being essentially a 'reverse Meltdown'-type attack, LVI abuses that a faulting or assisted load instruction executed within a victim domain does not always yield the expected result, but may instead transiently forward dummy values or data from various microarchitectural buffers."

The recent attacks exploiting the BlueKeep vulnerability to deliver cryptocurrency miners caused some systems to crash due to a Meltdown patch being deployed on the targeted machines. read more