They find a security and hardware design bug in the Thunderbolt ports that allow any PC and even Mac to be hacked in a matter of minutes.
By now, Thunderbolt ports have become a regular component of any laptop, be it PC or Mac. Its benefits, speed, and security justified its integration into computers with the most advanced hardware.
But it turns out that these entries actually have a serious and very delicate flaw, which would allow hacking and stealing information from hard drives in a matter of minutes.
A researcher from the Eindhoven University of Technology has revealed that the existence of some vulnerabilities discovered in the Thunderbolt connection standard could expose the information of any device with these ports.
The subject responsible for uncovering the flaw, Björn Ruytenberg, claims that in theory, this error could give access to all data in about five minutes, even if the laptop is locked, password protected, and has an encrypted hard drive. And to demonstrate it uploaded this video:
As we can see the process is a bit complicated. Since it requires physical access to the laptop to disassemble and connect a series of components; They link to another computer that allows the security locks to be released from the Thunderbolt port.
All this intervention would be based on a hardware design flaw. So any computer with such a port made from 2019 backwards could be vulnerable.
In the video, it breaks the security of a password protected Lenovo ThinkPad laptop . But in theory this bug could also partially affect Mac computers. Although Linux and Windows are the most vulnerable platforms.
Disabling the Thunderbolt port from the BIOS would be the only current solution to this failure.
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