Warning: Detected malicious code hidden in the graphics card's VRAM

One of the aspects that make cybercriminals dangerous lies in the initiative they take in deploying new forms of malicious attacks.

At the same time, even advanced security systems often fall into a passive state in many situations.

International cybersecurity experts have just issued a warning about the fact that hackers are actively trying to exploit the victim's graphics card by hiding malicious code inside VRAM. This tactic will help prevent malicious code from being detected by the antivirus tool when it scans your PC's main RAM. Just a few days ago, a proof-of-concept (PoC) document regarding a malicious tool that helps deploy this attack was sold online, according to a report from Bleeping Computer.

Warning: Detected malicious code hidden in the graphics card's VRAM Picture 1 Warning: Detected malicious code hidden in the graphics card's VRAM Picture 1

In theory, a hacker could hide malicious code in the graphics card's memory cache that the rest of the system can't detect. However, details on how to proceed are still unknown. Documents for sale by hackers include a malicious deployment toolkit, accompanied by PoCdescribe - a piece of software that allocates address space in GPU VRAM, then surreptitiously inserts and executes code from there. . Because as mentioned, all current antivirus programs are not equipped with the ability to scan the GPU's VRAM.

To deploy this malicious process, users need to have a Windows PC that supports OpenCL 2.0 or later. The test model is said to have worked with Intel's UHD 620/630 integrated graphics, as well as Radeon RX 5700, GeForce GTX 740M, and GTX 1650 discrete graphics card models.

It's important to note that this isn't the first time the security world has seen a similar exploit happen. A few years ago, an international team of security researchers also announced the discovery of an open source attack called Jellyfish, which exploited the LD_PRELOAD technique from OpenCL to connect system calls and GPUs. to force execution of malicious code from the GPU. You can see the details of this attack on GitHub here. That shows that hackers can completely use OpenCL to hide the code in the GPU without being detected by the PC.