Rowhammer gets more serious as it becomes exploitable over a LAN

The Rowhammer attack has been known for years but was relatively low-impact because it was hard to exploit and required access to a system. However, researchers discovered the bar is getting lower as it's now possible to exploit this memory chip weakness using nothing more than packets send over a local area network. This is made possible by increasingly fast network connections, which allow malicious actors to send specially crafted network packets in rapid succession. This potentially puts cloud services at risk. Full details at ARS Technica.

"Thus far, Rowhammer has been commonly perceived as a dangerous hardware bug that allows attackers capable of executing code on a machine to escalate their privileges," the researchers wrote. "In this paper, we have shown that Rowhammer is much more dangerous and also allows for remote attacks in practical settings. We show that even at relatively modest network speeds of 10Gbps, it is possible to flip bits in a victim machine from across the network."