New Intel ‘ZombieLoad’ Security Flaw Discovered

It wasn’t too long ago that Intel was inundated with the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a ton of their processors. To their credit, the company did take steps to try and address the problem, but it seems that new vulnerabilities have since been discovered by the original researchers who found the Meltdown and Spectre flaws.

Dubbed “ZombieLoad”, this is a side-channel attack that targets Intel’s chipsets. However, one of the main differences of this attack is that instead of injecting malicious code which could be installed by tricking users into installing malware, it relies on the design flaws in the chipsets themselves.

The reason for the name of this vulnerability is that it is because it takes data that the processor cannot understand or process, and forces it to ask for help from the processor’s microcode to prevent the system from crashing. Through this attack, it will force the data to leak from the processor’s core.

Before you start to panic and dump your Intel processors, note that this attack is said to be relatively difficult to pull off and will require a certain set of skills and effort in order to be successfully used. Plus, the good news is that Intel has since released microcode to patch the vulnerable processors so chances of it affecting you will be relatively low.

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