DailyPost 646
RAMpage
Hacking exploits, mitigation and serious hacking possibilities again, evading the mitigation is turning out to an extremely pernicious face of the cyber world. It has turned out to be a war of attrition. The concept of asymmetric warfare seems to be reaching its full bloom. It can even be one hacker against all. Over the past two years, the Rowhammer bug transformed from a hard-to-exploit DRAM disturbance error into a fully weaponised attack vector.
Since then lots of mitigation has been put in place. Very recently, a team of security researchers discovered a new set of techniques which could by pass present mitigations to prevent DMA-based Rowhammer attack against Android devices. It is a hardware vulnerability and puts all the Android devices built since 2012 at the risk of hacking. Dubbed as RAMpage as it exploits memory pages in the RAM. This new vulnerability can allow hackers hackers to take complete control of your smarphone.
” While apps are typically not permitted to read data from other apps, a malicious program can craft a rampage exploit to get administrative control and get hold of secrets stored in the device.” Ripping apart this operational principle there is a likelihood that it would leak almost all of your personal data to the hackers; ranging from saved passwords, emails, messages, business documents and photographs. The complexity of the hacking scenario can be gauged from the fact that RAMpage has been around for the last six years before getting detected. This is a veritable landmine every user is sitting upon.
As of now no patch is yet available for the RAMpage vulnerability. This is when tall claims are being made regarding cyber security. Non one confirms that the desktops are safe from it. Google has recognised this flaw (CVE-2018-9442), but doesn’t recognize it to be as serious as the researchers claim it to be. Researchers are valuable in battle against hackers both for discovering breaches and for providing mitigation, evident many times in the last one year.
HACKING IS THE EPITOME OF ASYMMETRIC WAR.
Sanjay Sahay