The IT Nerd

A couple of months ago we heard about Meltdown and Spectre. That was bad as it’s affected everyone who runs a PC, Mac, or pretty much anything else. But it’s about to get worse as we now have the following new chip flaws to worry about:

• RyzenFall
• MasterKey
• Fallout
• Chimera

The flaws, which are 13 vulnerabilities that fall into the above four buckets, were uncovered by a company called CTS Labs who served up a report via a very slick and fancy website and reportedly only gave AMD 24 hours to respond. That’s a bit of a #fail as we don’t know if their findings are actually valid. Here’s one reason why I am personally skeptical. There’s this disclaimer on the website that I linked to above:

Although we have a good faith belief in our analysis and believe it to be objective and unbiased, you are advised that we may have, either directly or indirectly, an economic interest in the performance of the securities of the companies whose products are the subject of our reports. Any other organizations named in this website have not confirmed the accuracy or determined the adequacy of its contents.

We’re expected to look past that and take this group seriously? Uh, my gut feeling is not to. But I will suspend disbelief as AMD is investigating and I am sure that every hacker on Earth is too so that they can leverage these flaws, if they are accurate, for pwnage on an epic scale. But if they aren’t accurate, I hope AMD sues them out of existence.

More to come.

This entry was posted on March 13, 2018 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags AMD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.