F-Secure, a Finnish cybersecurity firm revealed on Friday that it has discovered another security flaw in the Intel hardware. This flaw could enable hackers to access corporate laptops remotely.
Earlier it was revealed that the Intel chip had flaws that made almost every smartphone, laptop, or tablets vulnerable to hackers. This flaw is allegedly unrelated to Spectre and Meltdown but is rather an issue within Intel Active Management Technology (AMT).
According to F-Secure, AMT is commonly found in most corporate laptops and the flaw will allow an attacker to take complete control over a user's device in a matter of seconds.
“The issue potentially affects millions of laptops globally," the cybersecurity firm said.
The hacker would need physical access to the device at first but once they had re-configured the AMT, they would be able to effectively “backdoor” the machine and access the device using a remote server, just by connecting to the same network as the user.
There is also a possibility that the hacker would be able to programme the AMT to their own server, thus bypassing the need to connect to the user’s network.
The hacker will be able to access all information on the device after exploiting the flaw and will be able to make changes, download malware, etc. quite easily. No solutions or security measures have been found as yet, other than choosing a strong AMT password or disabling the AMT completely.