A year ago today, Intel coordinated with a web of academic and independent researchers to disclose a pair of security vulnerabilities with unprecedented impact. Since then, a core Intel hacking team has worked to help clean up the mess—by creating attacks of their own.
Let's be honest here: modern processors aren’t exciting. Speed bumps no longer thrill us, and we’ve become blasé about adding more cores. But we are living in a time when computers casually offer amounts of processing power that would have made previous generations swoon.
Intel says that a piece of software inside virtually all of its newest computer chips contains a critical security flaw that enables an attacker to manipulate security features, run arbitrary code or crash a system.
The chip maker launched a comprehensive review of its firmware after a private team of Russian security researchers reported in August it had found a way to access a backdoor designed to allow some government customers to disable the Management Engine (ME) master controller inside Intel CPUs.
Intel unveiled a range of new processors aimed at the performance-desktop segment today. For the mainstream market, there are three new K-series overclockable chips branded as ninth-generation parts; seven new Core X-series chips are launching for the high-end desktop market, and for those who need still more performance, there's an overclockable Xeon chip.
L33tdawg: See this attack in action at HITBSecConf2018 - Dubai.
Apple has secretly fixed a security issue affecting some laptops that shipped with Intel chips that were mistakenly left configured into "manufacturing mode."
The OS maker fixed the issue in June, with the release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.5, and Security Update 2018-003 for macOS Sierra and El Capitan.
At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, and Dirk Hohndel, VMware VP and chief open source officer, had a wide-ranging conversation about Linux security, open-source developer, and quantum computing.
Torvalds would really like his work to get back to being boring. It hasn't been lately because of Intel's CPU Meltdown and Spectre security bugs. The root cause behind these security holes was speculative execution.
There have been murmurs - from sources both official and unofficial - of an imminent re-entry into the discrete graphics card market by Intel. This would potentially add a major third player into a market that's effectively duopoly between Nvidia and AMD's graphics cards. Two months ago, Intel all but confirmed its foray into this field, touting a possible 2020 release date, and today, the company has released its first teaser for it.
Intel is rumored to be introducing its 9th generation processors in October. While Intel’s 10nm Cannon Lake chips have been delayed until 2019, this year’s refresh will be based on improvements to the existing 14nm process. Wccftech reports that Intel will introduce new Core i9, i7, and i5 chips on October 1st that will be branded as 9th generation processors.
While Intel's naming scheme for its processors is often best described as "obtuse," there have been some patterns that the company seemed to follow. For desktop processors, the i7 branding denotes chips with hyperthreading enabled, running two threads on each core. i5-branded parts had the same number of cores but with hyperthreading disabled. i3 parts in turn had fewer cores than i5 parts, but once again with hyperthreading enabled.
Intel is continuing to expand its security leadership roster in the aftermath of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities disclosure with the recent hire of an Apple veteran.
Window Snyder, who worked for five years on security and privacy strategy for iOS and Mac OS X at Apple, has been hired as Intel's first chief software security officer, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced on Monday. She will begin on July 9 in the company's Software and Services Group as vice president and general manager of the Intel Platform Security Division.
