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El Reg published an article about a security flaw introduced by Intel starting with its Pentium Pro line of processors--and left in place for fifteen years, fixing it only in 2011--and also comes with instructions on how to exploit it. So, if you have any pre-2011 processor running some important machine, perhaps you should be thinking of an upgrade after you finish reading the article.
From the article:
It allows smart hackers to run rootkit code at the very lowest level on the computer, out of reach of the operating system, its applications, and even the hypervisor. This means the rootkit can, among other things, silently monitor and record the user's every keypress, mouse click, and download.
Efforts to detect the rootkit and eradicate it from a computer can be blocked, or hampered, by the malware itself. A nightmare, in other words.
The good news is that Intel spotted the howler in its processor blueprints, and corrected the issue: chips built from January 2011 and onwards (Sandy Bridge Core CPUs and later) are not affected. Also, operating systems can mitigate against the security hole at the hypervisor level, thus protecting themselves from miscreants exploiting the design flaw...
This kind of thing makes me want to go back to using a pocket calculator.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday August 12 2015, @10:31AM
This would be your kernel breaking into... itself
The linux is not the only thing ever to contain a kernel.
Remember the part when, once installed, the "hyper"-kit is trivially undetectable? TFS doesn't say it explicitly, but I assume also it'd persist OS installs.
What OS did your machine had preinstalled when you bought it? Can you certify that it was the first OS to touch it?
Of course, as already stated in another comment, AMT is a lot more usable, but still.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @04:37PM
No, because it's still normal volatile memory. If you want to persist OS installs, then you must replace Flash firmware and/or the BIOS. If you manage to do the latter, you don't need to hack SMM, you have access to it directly (as the very fist thing run on a PC are the initialization routines in the Flash firmware and the system BIOS). In other words, as soon as you get to the firmware level, it's definitely game over, as you've got 100% control over the computer before even the first bit of the operating system, or even of the bootloader, gets read.