Proactive Patch Management

In this day in age, computer vulnerabilities are constantly coming up and according to recent reports, the SWAPGS attack is impacting computers running 64-bit INTEL and AMD processors.

It gives the attacker access to the passwords and personal information found in the operating systems kernel memory. According to researchers, all Intel CPUs manufactured between 2012 and today are vulnerable to the attack.

AMD has issued the following statement: “AMD is aware of new research claiming new speculative execution attacks that may allow access to privileged kernel data. Based on external and internal analysis, AMD believes it is not vulnerable to the SWAPGS variant attacks because AMD products are designed not to speculate on the new GS value following a speculative SWAPGS. For the attack that is not a SWAPGS variant, the mitigation is to implement our existing recommendations for Spectre variant 1.”

Microsoft has been working on this known vulnerability for some time now and issued a patch in a recent July update.  

In summary - This just goes to show how important it is to constantly have your updates and patches installed as they're released. In many cases, major vulnerabilities and attacks are avoidable if you have the latest versions of software.