Oh, For Fucking Christ’ Sake – Another Memory Bug

Right, listen up. Some “researchers” (read: people with too much time and a frankly disturbing fascination with RAM) have found another way to screw up your DDR5 memory. It’s called “Phoenix,” because apparently naming these things after mythical birds of destruction is now mandatory.

Basically, Rowhammer – that whole thing where repeatedly accessing rows of memory can cause bit flips and potentially let you gain unauthorized access? Yeah, it’s back. And worse. This Phoenix bullshit exploits a weakness in the error correction code (ECC) used to *prevent* Rowhammer. They’re using carefully timed sequences to overwhelm the ECC, causing errors that bypass all the defenses people thought they had.

It’s not just theoretical either; they managed to pull this off on multiple systems and chip manufacturers are affected. Mitigation? “Software-based” fixes, which means performance hits or hoping your OS/BIOS vendor gets their act together. Fantastic. Just what we needed – more software layers trying to fix hardware problems.

They’re saying it’s harder to pull off than previous Rowhammer attacks, requiring physical proximity and a lot of effort. But let’s be real: if someone *wants* into your system badly enough, this isn’t going to stop them. It just raises the bar for incompetence.

So yeah, enjoy your slightly-less-secure RAM. I’m sure everything will be fine.

Read the full, depressing story here

Related Bullshit

I once spent three days debugging a server issue that turned out to be caused by a faulty stick of RAM. Three days! Turns out some idiot had mixed different brands and speeds in the slots. The vendor support guy actually *laughed* at me when I told him what happened. Laughed. That’s the level of respect we’re dealing with here, folks.

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