You must have seen that the PCs and laptops of the world are also vulnerable to hacking because of the components inside them and not just because of the software. Earlier, we saw that Intel chips were causing a lot of PCs to be hacked and hackers were able to gain remote access just because of a flaw inside the chips. Soon after, Intel released a firmware update in which the said flaw was fixed and millions of PCs powered by Intel chips were saved.
Now, a similar report has surfaced which also affects millions of PCs due to a component inside the hardware of the device. This time around, the hardware in question is Thunderbolt port which is found on all the modern laptops and even PCs to some extent. We have seen that people are demanding thunderbolt port to be present on every device because of the ability it has of driving multiple monitors, as well as faster read/, write speeds.
With this flaw, however, the PCs without a thunderbolt port are safe and those with the port are said to be under attack. As per a report from ZDNet, “Dutch researcher has detailed nine attack scenarios that work against all computers with Thunderbolt shipped since 2011 and which allow an attacker with physical access to quickly steal data from encrypted drives and memory”.
As per the researcher, the flaw is such that there is a high chance of getting hacked even if best practices are followed by the users. These best practices include locking the computer when idle as well as secure boot into the OS as well as strong BIOS usage and operating system passwords among other things. The research reveals that even full disk encryption does not work against this flaw meaning that it is something worse.
