NVIDIA Releases Fix For Dangerous Display Driver Exploit 84
wiredmikey writes "NVIDIA on Saturday quietly released a driver update (version 310.90) that fixes a recently-uncovered security vulnerability in the NVIDIA Display Driver service (nvvsvc.exe). The vulnerability was disclosed on Christmas day by Peter Winter-Smith, a researcher from the U.K. According to Rapid7's HD Moore, the vulnerability allows a remote attacker with a valid domain account to gain super-user access to any desktop or laptop running the vulnerable service, and allows an attacker (or rogue user) with a low-privileged account to gain super-access to their own system. In addition to the security fix, driver version 310.90 addresses other bugs and brings performance increases for several games and applications for a number of GPUs including the GeForce 400/500/600 Series."
It's also pretty old (Score:5, Insightful)
About 7.5 years old. It is reasonable that they cease supporting it with new drivers. You can still get drivers for it, they have drivers for OSes up to and including Windows 8, they just aren't keeping support in newer unified drivers.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. They gave you over 7 years of driver updates. It is fairly unrealistic to assume that they'll continue with new support forever, particularly given that there is little reason. The 7 series can't do WDDM 1.1 or 1.2, it can't handle DirectX 10, 10.1, 11 or 11.1, it can't do CUDA, DirectCompute or OpenCL. There is just little in the way of things to implement for it.
If you wish to continue using the card, no problem (though be aware that an Intel 4000 series GPU found in Ivy Bridge processors is likely to be faster, and certainly has far more features) just use the 306 series drivers. It will continue to operate with those no problem.
If the security issues is what you are worried about, it looks like it only affected the 310 drivers, so no issues there.
ATI had an exploit too (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we as geeks and IT professionals need to worry about this?
First it was the OS that got you owned. Then when Linux, Macosx, and NT/XP came it was about IE. IE 5.5 and 6 were instant targets. Then as that died off it was flash, java, and ODF addons.
Are video drivers next? Which never gets updated? The video drivers. Which has its own cpu, ram, and is never checked by AV? The video card. A reflash would be a nightmate.
Re:It's also pretty old (Score:4, Insightful)
Nvidia and ATI have great cheap $49 cards if you want aero. That can cream the gaming 7800 series easily. No meed to get a new system.
If it is on XP you have a lot more security issues than this card though.