A Lovely 10C Site!

On Sunday, Eindhoven University of Technology researcher Björn Ruytenberg revealed the details of a new attack method he's calling Thunderspy. On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer—and even its hard disk encryption—to gain full access to the computer's data. And while his attack in many cases requires opening a target laptop's case with a screwdriver, it leaves no trace of intrusion and can be pulled off in just a few minutes. That opens a new avenue to what the security industry calls an "evil maid attack," the threat of any hacker who can get alone time with a computer in, say, a hotel room. Ruytenberg says there's no easy software fix, only disabling the Thunderbolt port altogether.

Ruytenberg points out that the flaws he found extend to Intel's hardware and can't be fixed with a mere software update. "Basically they will have to do a silicon redesign," he says. Nor can users change the security settings of their Thunderbolt port in their operating system to prevent the attack, given that Ruytenberg discovered how to turn those settings off. Instead, he says that paranoid users may want to disable their Thunderbolt port altogether in their computer's BIOS, though the process of doing so will be different for every affected PC. On top of disabling Thunderbolt in BIOS, users will also need to enable hard disk encryption and turn their computers off entirely when they leave them unattended, in order to be fully protected.

Yikes, this looks bad. Can check to see if you have this flaw here