Hackersidea

E arlier this year, after disclose potentially dangerous Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a large family of modern processors proven that speculative execution attacks can be exploited in a trivial way to access highly senssitive information Since then, several more variants of speculative execution attacks have been discovered, including Spectre-NG, SpectreRSB, Spectre 1.1, Spectre1.2, TLBleed, Lazy FP, NetSpectre and Foreshadow, patches for which were released by affected vendors time-to-time. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded Now, the same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have uncovered 7 new transient execution attacks affecting 3 major processor vendors—Intel, AMD

Processors are vital to running all our computerized devices, even if we hardly ever think about them. That's why it's a big deal that they have major vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, that leave them open to hacking attacks. As they run all the essential processes on your computer, these silicon chips handle extremely sensitive data. That includes passwords and encryption keys, the fundamental tools for keeping your computer secure. The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, revealed Wednesday, could let attackers capture information they shouldn't be able to access, like  those passwords and keys. As a result, an attack on a computer chip can turn into a serious security concern. What are the vulnerabilities? Researchers found two major weaknesses in processors that could let attackers read sensitive information that should never leave the CPU, or central processing unit. In both cases, attackers could see data that the processor temp