A bug in Intel's AMT (Active Management Technology), ISM (Standard Manageability) and SBT (Small Business Technology) firmware versions 6 to 11.6 sits unpatched since 2008 - a bug which allows "an unprivileged attacker to gain control of the manageability features provided by these products." Potentially, this could have led systems to be exploited for remote control and spyware infection (and maybe it did lead to that, and we just don't know about it.) Through this flaw, hackers could log into a vulnerable computer's hardware - outside the security features of the OS and any anti-virus suites - and silently install malware and other thriving pieces of malevolent coding. AMT having direct access to the computer's network hardware ensures this could have been done outside of local tampering. The vulnerable AMT service is part of Intel's vPro suite of processor features, so it's catering more to businesses and server boxes than for the usual consumer-based products - though we all know some hardware enthusiast's usage of this kind of processors in their personal rigs. If you don't have vPro or AMT present at all, you are in the clear. However, some outlets report that Intel systems are vulnerable to direct hardware access even if their AMT, ISM, or SBT implementations aren't provisioned - it's just the network access that doesn't work.

These insecure management features have been available in various Intel chipsets for nearly a decade, starting with the Nehalem Core i7 in 2008, all the way up to this year's Kaby Lake Core parts. Luckily, this "feature", which is present in millions of Intel chips and potentially provides a "backdoor-esque" entry point to equal millions of systems, appears to be able to be addressed through a microcode update. However, this update will have to be pushed by your system manufacturer, and you can probably begin to imagine by now how such a process will linger on, and how hard it will be for this to happen to every affected system.According to Intel, this critical security vulnerability, labeled CVE-2017-5689, was discovered and reported in March by Maksim Malyutin at Embedi. the company has issued some statements regarding this issue:

"In March 2017 a security researcher identified and reported to Intel a critical firmware vulnerability in business PCs and devices that utilize Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), Intel Standard Manageability (ISM), or Intel Small Business Technology (SBT)," a company representative said, adding that "Consumer PCs are not impacted by this vulnerability. We are not aware of any exploitation of this vulnerability. We have implemented and validated a firmware update to address the problem, and we are cooperating with equipment manufacturers to make it available to end-users as soon as possible."

According to Intel, the problem manifests as such:

• An unprivileged network attacker could gain system privileges to provisioned Intel manageability SKUs: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and Intel Standard Manageability (ISM).
• An unprivileged local attacker could provision manageability features gaining unprivileged network or local system privileges on Intel manageability SKUs: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), Intel Standard Manageability (ISM), and Intel Small Business Technology (SBT).

Whether you're using AMT, ISM or SBT, the fixed firmware versions to look out for (depending on the processor family) are:

• First-gen Core family: 6.2.61.3535
• Second-gen Core family: 7.1.91.3272
• Third-gen Core family: 8.1.71.3608
• Fourth-gen Core family: 9.1.41.3024 and 9.5.61.3012
• Fifth-gen Core family: 10.0.55.3000
• Sixth-gen Core family: 11.0.25.3001
• Seventh-gen Core family: 11.6.27.3264

Look over this document to determine if you have an AMT, SBA or ISM-capable system and this guide to see if your system has the impacted firmware.