The beat the apocalypse theme to death, Kris Kapersky will show off proof-of-concept code and demonstrate how to use JavaScript code or TCP/IP packet storms against Intel-based machines in October 2008. In other words, because Intel has 80% of the market, everyone should take pause.
To quote from Researcher set to demo attack on Intel chips:
Kapersky also charged that such CPU bugs [he discovered] actually have damaged hard drives without users' knowledge.
"Although CPU bugs are not something new in the security industry, nobody has come out with any proof-of-concept exploits," wrote Kaspersky. "It is just a matter of time before we start seeing these sort of attacks used in more devastating ways over the Internet. Intel has provided work-arounds to major BIOS vendors for some of these bugs, but who knows which vendor actually uses them? End- users are in the dark as to how to check if they are secure or not. Intel doesn't provide any test program for this, and the worst thing is [that] some bugs are still not fixed. In other words, Intel has no work-around for it."
End-users are in the dark, indeed.
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