Security: MalwareTech, Linux vs Meltdown and Spectre, Linus Torvalds Rage, Microsoft Bricks Machines
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MalwareTech Prosecution Appears To Be Falling Apart As Gov't Plays Keep Away With Documents Requested By Defense
Marcus Hutchins, a.k.a. MalwareTech, went from internet hero (following his inadvertent shutdown of the WannaCry ransomware) to federal government detainee in a surprisingly short amount of time. Three months after saving the world from rampaging malware built on NSA exploits, Hutchins was arrested at the Las Vegas airport as he waited for his flight home to the UK.
When the indictment was published, many people noted the charges didn't seem to be backed by much evidence. The government accused Hutchins of creating and selling the Kronos malware, but the offered very little to support this claim. While it's true much of the evidence against Hutchins will be produced in court, the indictment appeared to be stretching legal definitions of certain computer crimes to their limits.
The government's case appears to be weak and reliant on dubious legal theories. It's not even 100% clear that creating and selling malware is an illegal act in and of itself. The charges the government brought rely heavily on proving Hutchins constructed malware with the intent to cause damage to computers. This isn't so easily proven, especially when the government itself is buying malware to deploy for its own purposes and has yet to bring charges against any of the vendors it buys from. Anyone selling exploits to governments could be said to be creating malware with intent to cause harm. That it's a government, rather than an individual, causing the harm shouldn't make any difference -- at least not if the government wants to claim selling of malware alone is a federal offense.
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The Linux vs Meltdown and Spectre battle continues
Meltdown is a CPU vulnerability. It works by using modern processors' out-of-order execution to read arbitrary kernel-memory location. This can include personal data and passwords. This functionality has been an important performance feature. It's present in many modern processors, most noticeably in 2010 and later Intel processors. By breaking down the wall between user applications and operating system's memory allocations, it can potentially be used to spy on the memory of other programs and the operating systems.
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‘It Can’t Be True.’ Inside the Semiconductor Industry’s Meltdown
It was late November and former Intel Corp. engineer Thomas Prescher was enjoying beers and burgers with friends in Dresden, Germany, when the conversation turned, ominously, to semiconductors.
Months earlier, cybersecurity researcher Anders Fogh had posted a blog suggesting a possible way to hack into chips powering most of the world’s computers, and the friends spent part of the evening trying to make sense of it. The idea nagged at Prescher, so when he got home he fired up his desktop computer and set about putting the theory into practice. At 2 a.m., a breakthrough: he’d strung together code that reinforced Fogh’s idea and suggested there was something seriously wrong.
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Linus Torvalds Is Not Happy About Intel's Meltdown And Spectre Mess
Meltdown and Spectre exploit an architectural flaw with the way processors handle speculative execution, a technique that most modern CPUs use to increase speed. Both classes of vulnerability could expose protected kernel memory, potentially allowing hackers to gain access to the inner workings of any unpatched system or penetrate security measures.
The flaw can't be fixed with a microcode update, meaning that developers for major OSes and platforms have had to devise workarounds that could seriously hurt performance.
In an email to a Linux list this week, Torvalds questioned the competence of Intel engineers and suggested that they were knowingly selling flawed products to the public. He also seemed particularly irritated that users could expect a five to 30 per cent projected performance hit from the fixes.
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It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs
Microsoft’s fix for the Meltdown and Spectre bugs may be crocking AMD-powered PCs.
A lengthy thread on answers.microsoft.com records numerous instances in which Security Update for Windows KB4056892, Redmond’s Meltdown/Spectre patch, leaves some AMD-powered PCs with the Windows 7 or 10 startup logo and not much more.
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