Hyper-threading | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A team of security researchers has discovered another serious side-channel vulnerability in Intel CPUs that could allow an attacker to sniff out sensitive protected data, like passwords and cryptographic keys, from other processes running in the same CPU core with simultaneous multi-threading feature enabled. The vulnerability, codenamed PortSmash (CVE-2018-5407), has joined the list of other dangerous side-channel vulnerabilities discovered in the past year, including Meltdown and Spectre , TLBleed , and Foreshadow . Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Technical University of Havana, Cuba, the new side-channel vulnerability resides in Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, the company's implementation of Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT). Simultaneous MultiThreading is a performance feature that works by splitting up each physical core of a processor into virtual cores, known as threads, allowing each core to...

Security-oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD has decided to disable support for Intel's hyper-threading performance-boosting feature, citing security concerns over Spectre-style timing attacks . Introduced in 2002, Hyper-threading is Intel's implementation of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) that allows the operating system to use a virtual core for each physical core present in processors in order to improve performance. The Hyper-threading feature comes enabled on computers by default for performance boosting, but in a detailed post published Tuesday, OpenBSD maintainer Mark Kettenis said such processor implementations could lead to Spectre-style timing attacks. "SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) implementations typically share TLBs and L1 caches between threads," Kettenis wrote. "This can make cache timing attacks a lot easier, and we strongly suspect that this will make several Spectre-class bugs exploitable." In cryptography, side-channe...

When people think of cybersecurity threats, they often picture external hackers breaking into networks. However, some of the most damaging breaches stem from within organizations. Whether through negligence or malicious intent, insiders can expose your organization to significant cybersecurity risks. According to Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report , 57% of companies experience over 20 insider-related security incidents a year, with human error involved in 68% of data breaches. With that, insider attacks result in the highest costs, averaging USD 4.99 million per attack, as per the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM Security.  What are insider threats? An insider threat originates from within an organization – it's the potential for anyone with authorized access to your critical systems to misuse their access, harming your organization. The worst part is that insiders are already within your IT perimeter and are familiar with your internal security prot...