Every Intel CPU Since 2011 Is Vulnerable To Deadly ZombieLoad Attack, And How You Can Fix It

If you own a laptop, odds are it's powered by an Intel CPU. If that's the case, that also means you're vulnerable to a newly discovered vulnerability.

It's an exploit that allows hackers to steal data directly from your processor, with no way to stop them.

Intel

The new bug is called ZombieLoad. It and three related vulnerabilities were discovered by the same researchers that previously uncovered the Spectre and Meltdown bugs. It even shares similarities with those two.

The biggest problem is that ZombieLoad and the other three new bugs affect every Intel processor made since 2011. That means a massive number of Windows PCs, Linux servers, MacBooks, and even many Chromebooks. Thankfully, at least users with AMD and ARM chips are safe.

Intel calls this set of flaws Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS). It says its latest 8th Gen and 9th Gen CPUs are already protected against the flaw, as will be all future processors thanks to hardware mitigation, though the researchers that uncovered it disagree.

The new bugs ZombieLoad, Fallout, RIDL and Store-to-Leak Forwarding, work by exploiting weaknesses in a commonly used feature called "speculative execution". This feature helps a processor predict what an app or program will need next in order to speed up load times. It guesses what should comes next and executes that before it's needed. The problem is that running the programs this way puts the results of the operations in the CPUs own short-term memory caches. The flaw then allows hackers to access this memory directly and steal your data.

Hackers can use ZombieLoad to steal passwords, confidential documents, and encryption keys directly from your CPU. A demonstration by the researchers also shows it can, worryingly, be used to see the websites a person is viewing in real time.

"It's kind of like we treat the CPU as a network of components, and we basically eavesdrop on the traffic between them," Cristiano Giuffrida, a researcher on the team told Wired. "We hear anything that these components exchange."

Courtesy: ZombieLoad Attack

The good news is that Intel, Apple, Google and Microsoft have already issued patches to fix the flaws, as have many Linux developers. However, this will negatively impact your CPU performance. Intel says consumer devices will slow up to 3 percent, and 9 percent for data center machines. Still, the slowdown is better than the risk of leaving it unpatched.

You can find details of Google's automatic updates here, as well as details for Apple's patches here. Microsoft is also pushing out the patches automatically, but you can find them on its website here.

Unfortunately, the researchers believe that MDS vulnerabilities aren't going to be patched out that easily, and we're likely to see more incidents in the future. In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed and your devices updated.