Foreshadow Attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It turns out that the root cause behind several previously disclosed speculative execution attacks against modern processors, such as Meltdown and Foreshadow , was misattributed to 'prefetching effect,' resulting in hardware vendors releasing incomplete mitigations and countermeasures. Sharing its findings with The Hacker News, a group of academics from the Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security finally revealed the exact reason behind why the kernel addresses are cached in the first place, as well as presented several new attacks that exploit the previously unidentified underlying issue, allowing attackers to sniff out sensitive data. The new research explains microarchitectural attacks were actually caused by speculative dereferencing of user-space registers in the kernel, which not just impacts the most recent Intel CPUs with the latest hardware mitigations, but also several modern processors from ARM, IBM, and AMD — previou

2018 has been quite a tough year for Intel. While the chip-maker giant is still dealing with Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities, yet another major speculative execution flaw has been revealed in Intel's Core and Xeon lines of processors that may leave users vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Dubbed Foreshadow , alternatively called L1 Terminal Fault or L1TF, the new attacks include three new speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors. The Foreshadow attacks could allow a hacker or malicious application to gain access to the sensitive data stored in a computer's memory or third-party clouds, including files, encryption keys, pictures, or passwords. The three Foreshadow vulnerabilities have been categorized into two variants: 1.) Foreshadow Foreshadow ( PDF ) targets a new technology originally been designed to protect select code and users' data from disclosure or modification, even if the entire system falls under a

As work ebbs with the typical end-of-year slowdown, now is a good time to review user roles and privileges and remove anyone who shouldn't have access as well as trim unnecessary permissions. In addition to saving some unnecessary license fees, a clean user inventory significantly enhances the security of your SaaS applications. From reducing risk to protecting against data leakage, here is how you can start the new year with a clean user list.  How Offboarded Users  Still  Have Access to Your Apps When employees leave a company, they trigger a series of changes to backend systems in their wake. First, they are removed from the company's identity provider (IdP), which kicks off an automated workflow that deactivates their email and removes access to all internal systems. When enterprises use an SSO (single sign-on), these former employees lose access to any online properties – including SaaS applications – that require SSO for login.  However, that doesn't mean that former employee