Side channel that leaked data from Intel CPUs patched by silent Windows update

To me the history of Pwn2Own exactly shows the trend I'm talking about. Going from very successful editions to increasingly less successful editions as the years go by to the point where the competition barely even exists anymore.

And then that baseband firmware exploit, that's the dream. You could hack any device with that almost regardless of what software runs on top. I put that in the same class as the Intel chip vulnerabilities.

There's also a big difference between these sort of vulnerabilities, and the sort of problems that enable for example ransomware, which is a serious issue that has a more difficult solution than simply designing more robust hardware.

Anyway, if you're intrigued maybe check out Ghost in the Shell sometime (not the one with Scarlett Johansson, although it is enjoyable, it's not really the same thing), if it needs to be Hollywood, then maybe the Hackers movie would also work a bit (with Angelina Jolie).

Even if you were just a lowly scriptkiddie, because of the bad update policies you could just go to an exploit website, like metasploit is now, and try out the list of old exploits on any target you were interested in. A friend of mine had 40.000 routers in some Scandinavian country because their ISP shipped them to customers with a 4 year old BSD release that had known vulnerabilities in it.

https://nvd.nist.gov/general/visualizations/vulnerability-vi...

I don't accept the general hand waving "they keep getting better" because they haven't.

Most of these the exfiltration rate is so slow that simply xor'ing the secret with a random seed that changes locations or moving the memory around itself would prevent any attack.