Zombie Load et al on Intel cpu’s.

[SpyderTracks]

I’m sure you’ve all heard of another fatal flaw in intels chips since 2011.

New secret-spilling flaw affects almost every Intel chip since 2011 – TechCrunch

Security researchers have found a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel chips which, if exploited, can be used to steal sensitive information directly from the processor., The bugs are reminiscent of Meltdown and Spectre, which exploited a weakness in speculative execution, an important part of how…

www.google.com

Basically, don’t bother reading any information from Intel, they are as usual releasing extremely biased and outright misleading testing and advice on how to truly protect against this issue. They ran benchmarks on games and apps that didn’t utilise HyperThreading in the first place.

All 3rd party reviewers and security reporters are advising to disable HyperThreading at the BIOS level as it’s inherently flawed. Below is a brand new test scenario on the performance impact on some games and applications and it’s not pretty.

Note the part where there is likely to be further impact once you’ve applied intels microcode mitigations on the CPU.

 

[debiruman665]

Is this even something the average person needs to be worried about?

I don't even have an antivirus installed on my laptop at all. In the last 7 years of having one installed, it has never alerted me to having prevented a virus at all.

I'm not really willing to turn my 9900k into a 9700k because there's a chance some virus might be able to read a memory location on a buffer.

Javascript is able to flip any memory location on your Ram using rowhammer but the entire internet hasn't disabled javascript yet

 

[SpyderTracks]

Is this even something the average person needs to be worried about?

I don't even have an antivirus installed on my laptop at all. In the last 7 years of having one installed, it has never alerted me to having prevented a virus at all.

I'm not really willing to turn my 9900k into a 9700k because there's a chance some virus might be able to read a memory location on a buffer.

Javascript is able to flip any memory location on your Ram using rowhammer but the entire internet hasn't disabled javascript yet

So you've disbled Windows Defender? If so, that's a bit silly as it won't cause any system impact.

It's like with anything, once the attack vector has been found, you can bet your bottom dollar that some nasty malware, probably state sponsored will infect those that haven't protected against it. And it will spread like wildfire.

Attack vectors are so different these days, you no longer have to click on anything to trigger a download, even the site itself can be compromised.

Even just applying the patches to protect against the flaws will still bring a heavy performance hit.

There was a fix applied to all browsers to protect against rowhammer.

 

[ubuysa]

Is this even something the average person needs to be worried about?

I don't even have an antivirus installed on my laptop at all. In the last 7 years of having one installed, it has never alerted me to having prevented a virus at all.

I'm not really willing to turn my 9900k into a 9700k because there's a chance some virus might be able to read a memory location on a buffer.

Javascript is able to flip any memory location on your Ram using rowhammer but the entire internet hasn't disabled javascript yet

The flaw in this theory is that modern malware doesn't stridently announce that you're infected - unless its ransomware of course. Decent malware infects you silently so you think all is well - and so that you do nothing.