Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Quick note rollup on Intel Centrino wireless vulnerability

(This post sponsored by the F-Secure blog :P)

Just a list of quick notes about the recent problems with Intel Centrino's wireless network card drivers:

  • Aug 2: Very very bad bugs were found in certain Intel-based systems with wireless network cards. Basically, if you have a laptop (any platform, even Mac) with an Intel Centrino wireless network card, it can be rooted removely by someone within range of the wireless network. F-Secure blog post. The post includes a link to a demonstration video.
  • Aug 2: Luckily, Intel was notified beforehand and released an update about the same time. F-Secure blog post. The 'update' was 130MB, which was a bit large for a driver update.
  • Aug 3: The update was buggy. Driver incompatibilities. The enormous size was because of bundling 32-bit and 64-bit drivers as wel as some Intel network tools in one package. F-Secure blog post.
  • Aug 14: Concerned by user feedback, Intel split the download into two packages, as well as a driver-only download. F-Secure has the scoop.
  • Aug 21: One of the programs in the update packgage is insanely buggy, eating up memory and CPU at alarming paces. Killing the process has no adverse effect if you let Windows XP handle the configuration. F-Secure.
  • Aug 24: Intel finally releases an updated version of the update package that fixes all the bugs. The End.
So...

Did you patch if you were vulnerable?

Did you re-patch if you didn't have the latest version already?

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