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<blockquote data-quote="Deleted member 65228" data-source="post: 703730">These flaws have been exploited. Project Zero from the Google team have developed Proof-Of-Concept&#039;s among other researchers who were responsible for identifying the problems and replicating them after the news broke out. There are even alleged PoC source code&#039;s being soon released. The likelihood is that the vulnerabilities have indeed been exploited by someone out there, but not in general in-the-wild malware, but a targeted attack which is likely to be unknown of.Despite the recent news and who discovered what, a Polish researcher who also once developed a rootkit via the hyper-visor technology (built into CPU&#039;s for many years - Intel/AMD have their own implementations) was investigating speculative referencing as early as 2010. I do not know if she got anywhere with real exploitation, but she did find some things out at the time. I doubt she was too far off from succeeding a PoC attack if she hadn&#039;t given up with it, and if I recall, she did forward her findings to vendors but didn&#039;t release a paper because there were no known attacks in the wild using attacks on such features.If a researcher can exploit them, so can a criminal who&#039;s good enough. And the real criminals out there who aren&#039;t being caught or are un-heard of, those are the ones who&#039;d be capable of exploiting such vulnerabilities. Properly executed targeted attacks where there is real interest going on. But of course there&#039;s a fine line between criminals like this, and the ones developing standard malware going into the wild and aimed at usual businesses/Home users.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Deleted member 65228, post: 703730"] These flaws have been exploited. Project Zero from the Google team have developed Proof-Of-Concept's among other researchers who were responsible for identifying the problems and replicating them after the news broke out. There are even alleged PoC source code's being soon released. The likelihood is that the vulnerabilities have indeed been exploited by someone out there, but not in general in-the-wild malware, but a targeted attack which is likely to be unknown of. Despite the recent news and who discovered what, a Polish researcher who also once developed a rootkit via the hyper-visor technology (built into CPU's for many years - Intel/AMD have their own implementations) was investigating speculative referencing as early as 2010. I do not know if she got anywhere with real exploitation, but she did find some things out at the time. I doubt she was too far off from succeeding a PoC attack if she hadn't given up with it, and if I recall, she did forward her findings to vendors but didn't release a paper because there were no known attacks in the wild using attacks on such features. If a researcher can exploit them, so can a criminal who's good enough. And the real criminals out there who aren't being caught or are un-heard of, those are the ones who'd be capable of exploiting such vulnerabilities. Properly executed targeted attacks where there is real interest going on. But of course there's a fine line between criminals like this, and the ones developing standard malware going into the wild and aimed at usual businesses/Home users. [/QUOTE]

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