US-CERT discloses security flaw in 64-bit Intel chips
The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has disclosed a flaw in Intel chips that could allow hackers to gain control of Windows and other operating systems, security experts say.
The flaw was disclosed the vulnerability in a security advisory released this week. Hackers could exploit the flaw to execute malicious code with kernel privileges, said a report in the Bitdefender blog.
"Some 64-bit operating systems and virtualization software running on Intel CPU hardware are vulnerable to a local privilege escalation attack," the US-CERT advisory says. "The vulnerability may be exploited for local privilege escalation or a guest-to-host virtual machine escape." Intel did not respond to a request for comment. Operating systems exposed to the vulnerability include Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, 64-bit versions of FreeBSD and NetBSD, as well as systems that include the Xen hypervisor, Bitdefender said Friday.
