A few days ago, it was revealed by a UK researcher that there was a critical vulnerability in the Nvidia Display Driver service. The vulnerability could be used by a hacker to gain super-user access to a target machine. The chip-maker has now rolled out a driver update which patches this exploit.
When Peter Winter-Smith first revealed the vulnerability on Christmas Day, it caused concerns among many users and organizations alike. Any person with nefarious intents could leverage the vulnerability to gain super-user access to any machine running the display driver service and could wreck havoc on that machine while at the same time, putting the user data at risk. All the hacker required was a valid domain to use the exploit.
Organizations making use of the said service were all the more concerned since the vulnerability put their machines at imminent risk. However, the good news is that Nvidia has been quite quick about it and within a few days, the company has rolled out a driver update.
The driver update, numbered version 310.90, not only patches the vulnerability in question but also goes to fix a number of other bugs. It also significantly enhances the performance of games and apps running on a number of Nvidia GPUs. It specifically updates SLI profiles for Far Cry 3 and NBA 2K13 and furnishes new 3D Vision profiles for a long list of games.
You can download the driver update from here and read its complete release notes here.
Source: Nvidia
Courtesy: Security Week
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