Firmware weakness extends red carpet for cold boot attacks

"The chilling reality of cold boot attacks" is the title of a video posted by F-Secure on Thursday. The chilling reality is that savvy security mischief-makers can still perform the attacks, as two researchers learned recently.

Here is a show of industry effort in the past, though. Computer firmware has carried measures to guard against cold boot attacks that essentially are seeking to grab sensitive data from high value computers.

Here is some good news: Cold boot attacks are not trivial types of exploit; they require physical access and special hardware tooling to perform, said Catalin Cimpanu in ZDNet. One argument might then be, well it's not such a big deal in terms of ease of exploit; not every computer user can get physical, so to speak, with anything more complex than changing batteries and plugging in new peripherals.