Millions of AMD Ryzen and EPYC systems affected by ‘Sinkclose’ vulnerability, mitigation measures already implemented

AMD’s EPYC and Ryzen chips are now vulnerable to a new vulnerability called “Sinkclose,” which could affect millions of CPUs worldwide.

Sinkclose vulnerability attacks a significant portion of AMD Ryzen and EPYC CPUs, making data theft and code insertion easy for hackers

Vulnerabilities in mainstream CPUs are not a big deal at all, as malicious individuals try every possible way to get a backdoor, whether it’s through a bug in the computer code or some loophole that hackers exploit and then try to steal your data. However, the new Sinkclose vulnerability is said to have been present in AMD CPUs for over a decade now, and it appears to have been made public at the Defcon hacker conference by people from security firm IOActive.

So what is Sinkclose? Well, according to a report from WIRED, the vulnerability allows hackers to run their malicious code on AMD CPUs when they are in “system management mode,” a sensitive mode that contains firmware files that are critical to operations.

But to inject a piece of code, hackers would need to gain “deep access to an AMD-powered computer or server.” To take control of your systems, hackers could use a malicious program called a bootkit, which is undetectable by antivirus software and compromises your systems’ security.

Imagine there are hackers from different countries or anyone else who wants to continue hacking your system. Even if you wipe the entire hard drive, the disk will still be there. It will be almost undetectable and unrecoverable.

– Krzysztof Okopski via WIRED

To mitigate the issue, users need to physically open up the computer and plug in a hardware-based programming tool known as an SPI Flash programmer, which makes the issue a bit complicated for the average consumer. Fortunately, AMD has acknowledged the vulnerability and thanked the researchers for closing the Sink to the public.

In response, the company issued New security bulletin AMD has addressed the vulnerability and released an expanded list of affected processors as well, which includes Ryzen 3000 series processors and above, as well as 1st generation EPYC server CPUs and above. AMD is also providing firmware and microcode patches to mitigate the impacts across different generations of CPUs. Mitigation solutions are available for all Ryzen and EPYC families, except for the older Ryzen 3000 Desktop family based on the Zen 2 core architecture.

So, it’s safe to say that AMD has identified the core issue. However, there’s still a lot of ground to cover, especially when it comes to mitigating the vulnerability, most likely via a BIOS update. For the average consumer, there’s nothing to worry about at the moment, and we’ll keep you updated as soon as AMD releases a new BIOS update to cover all the causes.