Security researchers at Moscow-based Positive Technologies have identified an undocumented configuration setting that disables Intel Management Engine 11, a CPU control mechanism that has been described as a security risk.

Intel’s ME consists of a microcontroller that works with the Platform Controller Hub chip, in conjunction with integrated peripherals. It handles much of the data travelling between the processor and external devices, and thus has access to most of the data on the host computer.

If compromised, it becomes a backdoor, giving an attacker control over the affected device.

Source: Intel ME controller chip has secret kill switch

Last week I was contacted by someone alerting me to the presence of a spam list. A big one. That’s a bit of a relative term though because whilst I’ve loaded “big” spam lists into Have I been pwned (HIBP) before, the largest to date has been a mere 393m records and belonged to River City Media. The one I’m writing about today is 711m records which makes it the largest single set of data I’ve ever loaded into HIBP. Just for a sense of scale, that’s almost one address for every single man, woman and child in all of Europe. This blog posts explains everything I know about it.

Source: Inside the Massive 711 Million Record Onliner Spambot Dump