Over the past two years, processors, in particular processors made by Intel, have been targeted by an unending series of attacks that have made it possible for skilled attackers to intercept passwords, encryption keys, and other secrets out of data stored in resident memory.
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Microsoft and Redhat have released advisories regarding a new variant of the Spectre Variant 1 side-channel vulnerability that affects modern Intel CPUs which leverage speculative-execution. There is some reason to believe that it affects some AMD processors as well. But no firm information has been provided as of yet.
A vulnerability in Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) feature of Intel processors appears relatively easy to abusive. A remote control authentication screen can be bypassed using a blank string through a proxy server. AMT lets sysadmins perform powerful tasks over a remote connection.