Personal information is vulnerable by mistake in Intel chips. Solution would affect equipment performance up to 30%
All Intel processors manufactured in the last decade (installed in billions of computers) have a serious security breach that would allow cybercriminals to access privileged information, such as passwords.
This is revealed by an investigation of the specialized cybersecurity site 'The Register' which states that this hole would allow a malicious program to read the protected areas of the 'kernel' memory, which is the fundamental part of the operating system, responsible for managing resources and give access to the programs in a secure way to the computer hardware.
Its importance lies in the fact that important data is stored there, such as session initiation keys or cached files, among others. With this vulnerability, hackers would not only have access to this information but could also take advantage to introduce malware into the device and exploit other security errors more easily.
But here the bad news does not stop. According to the report, the application of a possible solution or update would cause yield losses of between 5 and 30 percent, depending on the model of the processor.
The flaw is in Intel hardware with x86-64 technology (the 64-bit version of the microchips) so it would affect all computers that include it regardless of the operating system, whether it's Android, iOS or Windows.
The error would also affect servers in the cloud, such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine, so companies are already working on updating tasks to solve the problem.
In November, Intel confirmed that some of its processors, including the sixth, seventh and eighth generation Intel Core, had "security vulnerabilities" that would open the doors to cybercriminals to execute malicious code without the user noticing or causing a failure or instability in the system.
