A new cloud attack can take full control of virtual machines with virtually no effort put in

The world of IT has just witnessed the most unsettling attack resulting from the rowhammer exploit. The exploit can flip individual bits in the memory of a computer.

The technique is so precise that it can allow a single machine to start stealing data from other machines that are hosted on the same cloud.

Until now, the Rowhammer exploit was considered a clumsy attack tool because it wasn’t really good enough to control where the data corrupting bits happened on a machine. Up till now, this attack was only considered a glitch until recently.

It is now capable of manipulating deduplication operations that are very common amongst cloud hosts to save memory.