A new vulnerability that is almost impossible to detect and fix has been found in AMD chips released since 2006 or even earlier. Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers at IOActive, a security company, shared this information at the Defcon hacker conference. This was reported by ArsTechnica.

The vulnerability, dubbed Sinkclose, allows attackers to run their code in one of the most privileged modes of AMD processors – System Management Mode. However, to exploit the vulnerability, attackers must already have deep access to PCs with the company’s processors.

The researchers also noted that although attackers need to have kernel-level access to a computer to exploit the vulnerability, other existing vulnerabilities that give them such access are already more than enough for any system.

Although Sinkclose is difficult to use, if attackers do gain access to a PC, they can add malware that will work at the deepest level of the system. Once infected, the malware can easily bypass antiviruses, is potentially invisible to the operating system, and gives attackers full access to interfere with the computer and track its activity.

According to the researchers, this method of infecting a computer is so deep that no amount of replacing the operating system will help get rid of the malware. The only way to detect and get rid of such a vulnerability is to physically connect to a specific part of the memory chip using the SPI Flash hardware programming tool and thorough cleaning.

Nissim and Okupski first reported the issue to AMD back in October 2023. The company responded that it had already released several updates to fix the vulnerability. In addition, the researchers promised not to publish the code confirming their findings for a few more months to give the company more time to patch Sinkclose.