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Almost unfixable “Sinkclose” bug affects hundreds of millions of AMD chips (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 15 points 3 months ago

For users seeking to protect themselves, Nissim and Okupski say that for Windows machines—likely the vast majority of affected systems—they expect patches for Sinkclose to be integrated into updates shared by computer makers with Microsoft, who will roll them into future operating system updates. Patches for servers, embedded systems, and Linux machines may be more piecemeal and manual; for Linux machines, it will depend in part on the distribution of Linux a computer has installed.

The headline is misleading: the bug is just as fixable as any, and firmware updates are expected to fix it. AMD do not have a "near-unfixable" processor vulnerability.

What's "near-unfixable" is a deeply embedded bootkit dropped through the successful exploitation of this bug, since it can make itself invisible to the OS and anti malware tools, and could survive a reinstallation of the OS.