Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections

A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops. Now, people are...

More Spectre/Meltdown-Like Attacks

Back in January, we learned about a class of vulnerabilities against microprocessors that leverages various performance and efficiency shortcuts for attack. I wrote that the first two attacks would be just the start: It shouldn't be surprising that microprocessor designers have been building...

A week in security (July 9 – July 15)

Last week, we talked about domestic abuse fuelled by IoT, doing threat intel programs right, blocking ICO fraud, and man-in-the-middle attacks. We also explained why we block shady ad blockers and provided tips to online shoppers for Prime Day. Other news: Reports revealed that low-end Android...

FreeBSD -- glob(3) related resource exhaustion

Problem description: GLOBLIMIT is supposed to limit the number of paths to prevent against memory or CPU attacks. The implementation however is insufficient...