Intels Processors vulnerable to hacker attacks

Written by: Pip - 19:29 Jun-18-2012

It was announced in a blog of the security company BitDefender, based on a discovery of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a U.S. government organization dedicated to cybersecurity, that Intel's processors are vulnerable to hacker atacks.

According to available information, the problem lies in the implementation that Intel made on one of the instructions of the extension x86-64. In other words, it is a failure that affects a command available only to the 64-bit environments, namely operating systems and virtual machines. Be that as it may, some software of this type do not seem to be affected because they do not use the instruction in question (SYSRET). However, the list of affected software includes 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, FreBSD and NetBSD.

The failure seems to be serious since the report indicates that it allows hackers to execute software with Kernell privileges as if requests were being made by the core part of the operating system.

The article states that the failure can be avoided in Windows operating systems by installing a patch available from Microsoft (MS12-042).

The 32-bit operating systems are not affected by this problem.

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