Millions of gaming PCs threatened by major security flaw
HP Omen gaming devices left vulnerable to attack
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“Millions” of gaming devices, including a wide variety ofHPOmengaming laptopsand desktops, as well asHP PavilionandHP Envymodels, need to be updated immediately,HPsaid.
Researchers from SentinelLabs published details of the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-3437, which can be exploited by threat actors to escalate privileges and disable security solutions, and conduct all kinds of malicious activities.
“This high severity vulnerability affects millions of PCs and users worldwide. While we haven’t seen any indicators that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild up till now, using anyOmen-branded PC with the vulnerable driver utilized by Omen Gaming Hub makes the user potentially vulnerable,”notethe researchers.
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The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed to HP in February, 2021, but SentinelLabs hasn’t found any instances of it being exploited in the wild.
Returning flaw
Parsing through the technical analysis,BleepingComputerreports that the vulnerability existed in the HP Omen Command Center, which helps gamers tweak the settings of their gaming machines.
The software can also be grabbed from theMicrosoftStore for anyWindows 10PC that uses accessories sold under HP’s Omen brand, which further increases the number of potentially exploitable computers.
As per the researchers, the source of the bug is a driver that partially relies on theopen sourceWinRing0.sys driver to help manage various low-level actions.
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“The link between the two drivers can readily be seen as on some signed HP versions the metadata information shows the original filename and product name. Unfortunately, issues with the WinRing0.sys driver are well-known,” share the researchers.
HP first released patches for the vulnerability through the Microsoft Store on July 27, before publishing asecurity advisoryto coincide with SentinelOne’s analysis.
Although the researchers haven’t spotted any exploits based on the vulnerability, they urge all impacted users to “ensure they take appropriate mitigating measures without delay.”
ViaBleepingComputer
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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