A bug in Intel's AMT (Active Management Technology), ISM (Standard Manageability) and SBT (Small Business Technology) firmware versions 6 to 11.6 sits unpatched since 2008 - a bug which allows "an unprivileged attacker to gain control of the manageability features provided by these products." Potentially, this could have led systems to be exploited for remote control and spyware infection (and maybe it did lead to that, and we just don't know about it.) Through this flaw, hackers could log into a vulnerable computer's hardware - outside the security features of the OS and any anti-virus suites - and silently install malware and other thriving pieces of malevolent coding. AMT having direct access to the computer's network hardware ensures this could have been done outside of local tampering. The vulnerable AMT service is part of Intel's vPro suite of processor features, so it's catering more to businesses and server boxes than for the usual consumer-based products - though we all know some hardware enthusiast's usage of this kind of processors in their personal rigs. If you don't have vPro or AMT present at all, you are in the clear. However, some outlets report that Intel systems are vulnerable to direct hardware access even if their AMT, ISM, or SBT implementations aren't provisioned - it's just the network access that doesn't work.

These insecure management features have been available in various Intel chipsets for nearly a decade, starting with the Nehalem Core i7 in 2008, all the way up to this year's Kaby Lake Core parts. Luckily, this "feature", which is present in millions of Intel chips and potentially provides a "backdoor-esque" entry point to equal millions of systems, appears to be able to be addressed through a microcode update. However, this update will have to be pushed by your system manufacturer, and you can probably begin to imagine by now how such a process will linger on, and how hard it will be for this to happen to every affected system.