DRAM Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Remember rowhammer vulnerability? A critical issue affecting modern DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips that could allow attackers to obtain higher kernel privileges on a targeted system by repeatedly accessing memory cells and induce bit flips. To mitigate Rowhammer vulnerability on the latest DDR4 DRAM, many memory chip manufacturers added some defenses under the umbrella term Target Row Refresh (TRR) that refreshes adjacent rows when a victim row is accessed more than a threshold. But it turns out 'Target Row Refresh,' promoted as a silver bullet to mitigate rowhammer attacks, is also insufficient and could let attackers execute new hammering patterns and re-enable the bit-flip attacks on the latest hardware as well. TRRespass: The Rowhammer Fuzzing Tool Tracked as CVE-2020-10255 , the newly reported vulnerability was discovered by researchers at VUSec Lab, who today also released ' TRRespass ,' an open source black box many-sided RowHammer fuzzin...

A team of cybersecurity researchers yesterday revealed details of a new side-channel attack on dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that could allow malicious programs installed on a modern system to read sensitive memory data from other processes running on the same hardware. Dubbed RAMBleed and identified as CVE-2019-0174 , the new attack is based on a well-known class of DRAM side channel attack called Rowhammer , various variants [ GLitch , RAMpage , Throwhammer ,  Nethammer , Drammer ] of which have been demonstrated by researchers in recent years. Known since 2012, Rowhammer bug is a hardware reliability issue that was found in the new generation of DRAM chips. It turned out that repeatedly and rapidly accessing (hammering) a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, i.e., changing their bit values from 0 to 1 or vice-versa. In the following years, researchers also demonstrated successful exploits to achieve privilege escalation on the vulnerable computers...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A team of security researchers has discovered a new set of techniques that could allow hackers to bypass all kind of present mitigations put in place to prevent DMA-based Rowhammer attacks against Android devices. Dubbed RAMpage , the new technique (CVE-2018-9442) could re-enable an unprivileged Android app running on the victim's device to take advantage from the previously disclosed Drammer attack , a variant of DRAM Rowhammer  hardware vulnerability for Android devices, in an attempt to gain root privileges on the target device. You might have already read a few articles about RAMpage on the Internet or even the research paper, but if you are still unable to understand— what the heck is RAMpage —we have briefed the research in language everyone can understand. Before jumping directly on the details of RAMpage, it is important for you to understand what is RowHammer vulnerability, how it can be exploited using Drammer attack to hack Android devices and what mitigations G...