Is there a real-world practical rowhammer attack against ECC memory? I haven't seen one and the test tools I ran never triggered anything on servers with ECC.
This commenter seemed quite credible to me, here's where it starts:
http://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/377...
> Yep, these are what we had -- uncorrectable errors with ECC memory caused by row hammer. Luckily there are mitigations. Sandy Bridge allows you to double...
The job of ECC is to prevent transient failures and to warn you about less-transient failures. It's not a paradox that it can't paper over things that are actually broken.
The scary thing about rowhammer isn't just the potential a fault, it's the potential for a security vulnerability. Yeah, a DOS attack isn't nice either, but it's a million times less worse than a privilege escalation caused by memory corruption.
For rowhammer to be even the same magnitude of problem with ECC memory would require not an uncorrectable error, but an error that gets past the error detection mechanism entirely and produces data either seen as correct or correctable, but which is not the original data.