The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: memory hack

In recent years, several groups of cybersecurity researchers have disclosed dozens of memory side-channel vulnerabilities in modern processors and DRAM s, like Rowhammer , RAMBleed , Spectre, and Meltdown . Have you ever noticed they all had at least one thing in common? That's OpenSSH. As a proof-of-concept, many researchers demonstrated their side-channel attacks against OpenSSH application installed on a targeted computer, where an unprivileged attacker-owned process exploits memory read vulnerabilities to steal secret SSH private keys from the restricted memory regions of the system. That's possible because OpenSSH has an agent that keeps a copy of your SSH key in the memory so that you don't have to type your passphrase every time you want to connect to the same remote server. However, modern operating systems by default store sensitive data, including encryption keys and passwords, in the kernel memory which can not be accessed by user-level privileged p

Security researchers have find out ways to hijack the Intel-compatible PCs running Linux by exploiting the physical weaknesses in certain varieties of DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic random-access memory) chips and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system. The technique, dubbed " rowhammer ", was outlined in a blog post published Monday by Google's Project Zero security initiative, a team of top security researchers dedicatedly identifies severe zero-day vulnerabilities in different software. Rowhammer is a problem with recent generation DRAM chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause " bit flipping " in an adjacent row which could allow anyone to change the value of contents stored in computer memory. WHAT IS ROWHAMMER BUG DDR memory is arranged in an array of rows and columns, which are assigned to various services, applications and OS resources in large blocks. In order to prevent each application from access

Last Friday, we reported that the website of the U.S. Council of Foreign Relations was allegedly compromised by Chinese hackers who exploited the zero-day bug that was only discovered that same day. The CFR website was compromised with JavaScript that served malicious code to older IE browsers and the code then created a heap-spray attack using Adobe Flash Player. Yesterday former hacker Bryce Case Jr (YTCracker) tweeted about a new zero day exploit threatening all users of IE8, " internet explorer 6-8 0day making the rounds force them toolbar installs and keyloggers on exgf while you still can... ". On Saturday, Microsoft published a security advisory warning users of Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 that they could be vulnerable to remote code execution hacks. The vulnerability is a remote code execution vulnerability that exists in the way that Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated. The vuln