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Comment by chinathrow | Hacker News Reader

I wonder the long term effect on unpatched MEs out there.

What would a skilled attacker use it for? Hack nearby laptops of folks within the cryptocurrency world?

Could one write a worm that worked purely on the Intel me, spread machine to machine via me Ethernet monitoring, that could then look at the local hd for crypto keys and report them back to a remote server?

Is the above theoretically possible?

Yes, it's a general-purpose processor inside your processor.

Using which exploit? Quoting the article: " The vulnerability identified in CVE-2017-5712 is exploitable remotely over the network in conjunction with a valid administrative Intel® Management Engine credential. The vulnerability is not exploitable if a valid administrative credential is unavailable."

So where is the Ethernet level remote vulnerability? The rest require physical access.

I think the gps meant “hypothetically” and not “theoretically,” presuming some future vulnerability

I envision a worm that disables the ME completely once it's found and "infected" another few. Perhaps show a message that says "Your computer is now owned... by you." That would certainly raise some interesting discussion about ethics...

While this is possible, people with dark motives are clearly incentivized more.

Based on what I've read so far, in my opinion the biggest risk from ME comes from targeted evil maid style scenarios. And I'm not sure if even in those limited conditions ME is reliably exploitable. So I'm more annoyed than panicking right now.

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