I don't think I've ever seen something this exploitable that is so prevalent. Like couldn't you just sit in an airport and open up a wifi hotspot and almost immediately own anyone with ATI graphics?
So you have to be on a shady hotspot, without VPN, AMD has recently published an update, and your update scheduler is timed to run.
That would be a little less than “immediately own anyone with ATI”.
That takes it out of the one day away territory, but it does allow an attacker to only have a malicious HTTP capture up and detectable during the actual attack window.
Then, of course, if you’re also being their DNS server you can send them to the wrong update check server in the first place. I wonder if the updater validates the certificate.
I guess that's how you prevent anything, just make it illegal and the exploit becomes an unintended illegal feature, like occupying the low-freq radio signal.
Some of us do not enable automatic updates (automatic updates are the peak of stupidity since Win98 era). And, when you sit in an airport, you don't update all your programs.
But it seems pretty trivial for some bad actor at local ISP.
Have you ever gone to a crowded public place and setup an open hotspot?
SSID "Sydney Airport Wifi" or the like.