INTEL-SA-00075 Detection and Migration Tool

If you like to stay up to date with the latest computer security news and events, you may know that at the beginning of May 2017, Intel acknowledged the existence of pretty serious chip vulnerability.

In short, this vulnerability mainly affects Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), and it allows hackers bypass all authentication elements in the remote management hardware and could potentially even take over your PC, as this Softpedia security news article thoroughly points out.

Even though this exploit mainly affects enterprise-class PCs with AMT business-class hardware, it's definitely worth taking the time to check for the vulnerability, especially since Intel has developed a bespoke and convenient tool for the job.

Dubbed INTEL-SA-00075 Detection and Migration Tool, it allows both day to day users and IT administrators to determine if their systems have been affected by the aforementioned exploit.

It comes in two versions: one is a typical GUI utility that besides providing the risk assessment evaluation, also offers important hardware and software details, and the other, a CLI-based app that saves all the relevant info to an XLM files. The latter should be more convenient for system administrators who want to perform discovery tasks across multiple computers.

That said, download INTEL-SA-00075 Detection and Migration Tool, run its wizard-based installer, and launch Intel-SA-00075-gui.exe via its desktop shortcut or directly from its source folder. Please note that the utility requires full administrative rights, as well as the presence of .NET Framework 3.5 on your computer's system.

After a short while, you should be provided with the results and risk statistic for your computer on the upper side of the main window. As expected, the Not Vulnerable result is presented using green, the international everything-is-ok color.

Otherwise, if the result is written in red, the next step should be to install one of the firmware fixes provided by your computer's maker.

In the end, losing control over one's computer is a prospect that could be deemed as a nightmare for most of us, system administrators or not. With that in mind, it's definitely recommended that you run the check using this useful utility, just to be on the safe side. On its own, it won't exactly fix the problem, but at least you know that it will help you make the first steps towards achieving that end.