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Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

What adtac said. If I let someone have physical access to any computer I own I fully expect to be compromised.

And here the issue is, as I understand it, I would have had to have left that AMT part in place with a default password. I get that it is geeky and maybe there should be a process where when you buy a new laptop they set the password to some unique thing and give you a sticky note with the password on it. I get that a lot of people won't know to change the management password, but that's an educational issue, just like people had to be taught to not use "1234" or "admin" as their login password.

Still seems like an over hyped issue but I guess that is part of the educational process.

I don't feel like this rises to the level of Meltdown or Spectre.

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I understand your sentiment, but I would argue that this is a flaw. Vendors need to account for users' ability to notice and assess these sorts of details. While it's true that most/all defenses eventually fail to a determined attacker with unrestricted physical access, most users wouldn't suspect it'd be so easy for someone to orchestrate the attack in their presence without attracting notice.

Leaving AMT enabled with a default local password when it hasn't been explicitly provisioned is an oversight by the system manufacturers. Expecting users (particularly outside the enterprise environment) to discover the necessary security precautions (without any notable cues) is a problem.

Education may be a short-term solution, but it's no substitute for repairing the user experience, e.g., by disabling unused AMT features (and preventing them from being reenabled without authenticated access to a pre-boot or other system management environment). Save AMT security for the subset of system owners that need to take advantage of the feature.

As I said elsewhere, I agree, the web server shouldn't be enabled with a default password.

>If I let someone have physical access to any computer I own I fully expect to be compromised.

What about if you're sleeping?

I've got 4 dogs and live in a rural area. You'd have to be bat shit crazy to want to mess with my stuff.

That said, it's a silly argument. If you don't secure your devices then you're gonna have a bad time. Just a fact of life, it's always been that way. Give a hacker physical access to a box and enough time and they are getting in. I do it routinely if I forgot a root password, boot knoppix, fix the root password on the boot disk, reboot.

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