It's interesting that this is being discussed again this year, because the critical part of the discussion really happened back in May of this year. https://nv

It's interesting that this is being discussed again this year, because the critical part of the discussion really happened back in May of this year. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5689 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5689 is the CVE in question and existed for ~7 years, permitting exactly the scenarios I postulated to occur given unprivileged access to the network on which the servers reside. There's been some rapid threat modeling done already: for example, for datacenter environments, the impact of this issue is largely mitigated by reducing physical access to this network behind the firewall - https://software.intel.com/en-us/documentation/amt-reference/manageability-ports https://software.intel.com/en-us/documentation/amt-reference... indicates that we can firewall traffic so that only known management computers can access it from outside. (However, one compromised computer in the datacenter can be used as a source to trigger this exploit, so whole-datacenter monitoring/alerting for traffic on these ports is required). The overall risk involved is still fairly high, because this security posture is effectively "remote root-level access for anyone with unprivileged access to the local network".