Specter malware may start attacking computers again
ARM and x86 processors are still vulnerable to Specter malware attacks. It turns out that the changes made in recent years to these processors, which were supposed to protect them from such attacks, are not as effective as originally thought. All thanks to the new software that allows you, however, to break into these systems even further.
Developed and described by Dutch scientists from VU Amsterdam they called Specter-BHI (Specter Branch History Injection. They say it’s a modified form of Specter v2 malware discovered in 2017, known as Specter-BTI (Branch Target Injection.) Just like the original malware, Specter-BHI can also leak sensitive information stored in CPU memory.
As mentioned earlier, the Specter threat was discovered in early 2017 and targets a function known under the generic name “speculative execution”. Thanks to him, the processor can predict in advance what the next instruction will be executed, which allows it to work much faster. Specter attacks deceive this mechanism and can retrieve sensitive data from the CPU, thanks to which they can penetrate your computer.
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Software vendors developed software solutions many years ago to prevent Specter attacks. Although it was effective, it most likely caused the processor performance to drop. Therefore, in the next step, processor manufacturers developed hardware protections called EIBRS (Intel) and CSV2 (ARM). The latest version of Specter malware appears to bypass these protections.
Intel has named two Specter BHI vulnerabilities CVE-2022-0001 and CVE-2022-0002, while ARM has named them CVE- 2022-23960. Intel announces that this applies to all processors, except for Atom chips. ARM included the following processors in this list: Cortex-A15, Cortex-A57, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A73, Cortex-A75, Cortex-A76, Cortex-A76AE, Cortex-A77, Cortex-A78, Cortex-A78AE, Cortex-A78C Cortex-X1, Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, Neoverse N1, Neoverse N2 and Neoverse V1.
Both companies have already published relevant tips to prevent such attacks. Depending on your CPU, ARM offers five different countermeasures to immunize your systems against these threats. They are available on this site.
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