There’s nothing quite like another round of vulnerability scares to take your system security worry levels to the next level. Security researchers have come up with a way to load code into the System Management Mode which, by no simple means, can be snooped into. The Register has more details:

The Intel caching hack is all the more serious because it burrows into SMM space, which is more privileged than a hypervisor area. As such it is a possible mechanism for creating “incredibly stealthy” rootkits, security blogger James Heary adds.

Invisible Things Lab’s paper touches on the long-running debate about security disclosure. According to Rutkowska, Intel’s own employees first wrote about how this class of CPU caching vulnerability might be exploited back in early 2005.

Things should get interesting very quickly.