High Severity
Potential CPU Security Issue
Feb 10, 2018 5:02 pm EDT
Categorized: High Severity
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On Wednesday, January 3, researchers announced a security vulnerability impacting microprocessors. IBM is working with our clients and industry partners on this issue, which has the potential to affect many types of computing devices from different manufacturers. It’s important to note there are no known cases where this vulnerability has been used maliciously.
Patches will be made available for IBM systems via our normal customer portals. Further details concerning potentially impacted processors in the POWER family can be found here. Per our business as usual process, all information for IBM Z clients can be found at the IBM Z Portal.
IBM Storage appliances are not impacted by this vulnerability. For Storage, further details concerning this vulnerability can be found here.
Additional information will be provided through normal IBM communications channels, including IBM Security Bulletins. Please actively monitor both your IBM Support Portal and the IBM PSIRT Blog.
The most immediate action clients can take to protect themselves is to prevent execution of unauthorized software on any system that handles sensitive data, including adjacent virtual machines.
We will continue to update this blog to include additional information as appropriate.
Potential Impact on Processors in the POWER Family
May 22, 2018 6:25 pm EDT | High Severity
In January 2018, three security vulnerabilities were made public that allow unauthorized users to bypass the hardware barrier between applications and kernel memory. These vulnerabilities all make use of speculative execution to perform side-channel information disclosure attacks. The first two vulnerabilities, CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017- 5715, are collectively known as Spectre, and allow user-level code to ...read more