Editor’s Note: This story was updated on November 17 with a comment from Intel.Security pros generally agree that teams should immediately patch the high-severity (8.8 CVSS) CPU bug that Intel released a fix for on Nov. 14.It was widely reported Tuesday that if left unpatched, the vulnerability — CVE-2023-23583 — could result in the taking down of the hypervisors sitting in servers on cloud hosts.Those worried about a mass case of “Blue Screen of Death” hitting cloud servers might be disappointed. “While this CPU bug can devastate a multi-tenant environment by creating a DDoS situation, the reality is that through Intel pushing microcode updates, this vulnerability is easily mitigated,” said John Gallagher, vice president of Viakoo Labs. “Of course this is only true of organizations that keep their BIOS, OS, and drivers updated to the latest versions, but for multi-tenant data center environments this should be the norm.” A spokesperson for Intel said while the chipmaker is not aware of any active attacks using this vulnerability, affected platforms have an available mitigation via a microcode update.“Intel discovered this issue internally and was already preparing the ecosystem to release a mitigation through our well-documented Intel Platform Update process,” said the Intel spokesperson. “At the request of customers, including OEMs and cloud service providers, this process typically includes a validation, integration, and deployment window after Intel deems the patch meets production quality, and helps ensure that mitigations are available to all customers on all supported Intel platforms when the issue is publicly disclosed.”Richard Taylor, co-founder and CTO, Approov Mobile Security, said while it’s possible that attackers could take down a series of cloud hosts, the attacker would need to get their code running on each core. Taylor added that he hopes affected cloud providers would have already patched prior to this disclosure. “If this bug wasn't patchable then it would indeed be very bad,” said Taylor. “Overall, it’s more of a question of whether this can be exploited in a more controlled fashion to leak data via a privilege escalation. It sounds like that would require a much deeper understanding of the internals and what specifically is going wrong, but there have been cases in the past where this has been painstakingly reverse engineered just via observation, so it may be possible.”
Patch/Configuration Management, Endpoint/Device Security
Patch high-severity ‘Reptar’ Intel chip bug soon, say security pros

Google researchers found a flaw that affects all modern Intel CPUs. (Adobe Stock)
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