processor Hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A novel side-channel attack called  GPU.zip  renders virtually all modern graphics processing units (GPU) vulnerable to information leakage. "This channel exploits an optimization that is data dependent, software transparent, and present in nearly all modern GPUs: graphical data compression," a group of academics from the University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign  said . Graphical data compression  is a feature in integrated GPUs (iGPUs) that allows for saving memory bandwidth and improving performance when rendering frames, compressing visual data losslessly even when it's not requested by software. The study found that the compression, which happens in various vendor-specific and undocumented ways, induces data-dependent  DRAM  traffic and cache occupancy that can be measured using a side-channel. "An attacker can exploit the iGPU-based compression channel to perform cro

A new research has yielded yet another means to pilfer sensitive data by exploiting what's the first "on-chip, cross-core" side-channel attack targeting the ring interconnect used in Intel Coffee Lake and Skylake processors. Published by a group of academics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the  findings  are expected to be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium coming this August. While information leakage attacks targeting the CPU microarchitecture have been previously demonstrated to break the isolation between user applications and the operating system, allowing a malicious program to access memory used by other programs (e.g., Meltdown and Spectre), the new attack leverages a contention on the ring interconnect. SoC  Ring interconnect  is an on-die bus arranged in a ring topology which enables intra-process communication between different components (aka agents) such as the cores, the last level cache (LLC), the graphics unit, and the syst

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.