The Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) of the United States has revealed a fault and imperfection in the chips of Intel and said that hackers are likely to gain access to the Windows as well as other operating systems. The security experts reported saying this can allow the hackers to have control over the operating systems and Windows too. This defect of the Intel chips was unveiled in a security advisory which spoke about its vulnerability and was released this week too.
According to the experts, hackers will be able to execute various malicious codes once they exploit the defect and will make use of kernel attempts. The US-CERT advisory said “Some 64-bit operating systems and virtualization software running on Intel CPU hardware are vulnerable to a local privilege escalation attack.” It also added “The vulnerability may be exploited for local privilege escalation or a guest-to-host virtual machine escape.”
A number of operating systems including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, 64-bit versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD and systems accompanying the Xen hypervisor are depicted to this weakness and flaw. Bitdefender said “While 32-bit operating systems are safe, Intel CPUs that use the Intel 64 extension need the security patches released by Microsoft in their MS12-042 security bulletin.” This vulnerability stems from the kind of handling of error the CPU does in their SYSRET instructions and versions, which is accustomed in the x86-64 standard.
The Xen Blog reported saying “If an operating system is written according to AMD’s spec, but run on Intel hardware, the difference in implementation can be exploited by an attacker to write to arbitrary addresses in the operating system’s memory.” The virtualization software of the VMware as well as the AMD processors is not being affected and does not make use of the SYSRET instruction. This vulnerability is to affect Joyent, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat and SUSE Linux apart from Microsoft and Intel.