Shutting down your laptop properly, or using hibernation and pre-boot authentication offer the best protection.

At the heart of this attack is the way computers manage RAM via firmware. Cold boot attacks aren’t new — the first ones came along in 2008. Back then, security researchers realized you could hard reboot a machine and siphon off a bit of data from the RAM. This could include sensitive information like encryption keys and personal documents that were open before the device rebooted. In the last few years, computers have been hardened against this kind of attack by ensuring RAM is cleared faster. For example, restoring power to a powered-down machine will erase the contents of RAM, ExtremeTech reported.

The new attack can get around the cold boot safeguards because it’s not off — it’s just asleep. F-Secure’s Olle Segerdahl and Pasi Saarinen found a way to rewrite the non-volatile memory chip that contains the security settings, thus disabling memory overwriting. After that, the attacker can boot from an external device to read the contents of the system’s RAM from before the device went to sleep.

You can see the process in the video below. It’s obviously quite involved, but an experienced attacker could get it done in a matter of minutes. F-Secure’s description of the attack seems intentionally vague on how exactly you modify the firmware security, but we are assured it’s “simple.” Perhaps the one saving grace here is that someone needs to have physical access to your computer and enough time to take it apart in order to steal any data. Some computers aren’t very easy to disassemble these days, either.

F-Secure says there’s no easy fix for PC vendors — there will always be ways to pull data out of RAM with the right methods. However, end users and businesses can change their practices to limit the impact of cold boot attacks. Using firmware passwords can harden computers, and just closing the lid on a laptop is risk. Rather than letting computers go to sleep, F-Secure recommends using hibernation. Hibernation will clear encryption keys from RAM, but other files could still be at risk. Shutting your computer all the way off is still the best defense.

Led by Professor Alfonso Jaramillo in the School of Life Sciences, new research has discovered that a common molecule — ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is produced abundantly by humans, plants and animals — can be genetically engineered to allow scientists to program the actions of a cell.

As well as fighting disease and injury in humans, scientists could harness this technique to control plant cells and reverse environmental and agricultural issues, making plants more resilient to disease and pests.

RNAs carry information between protein and DNA in cells, and Professor Jaramillo has proved that these molecules can be produced and organised into tailor-made sequences of commands — similar to codes for computer software — which feed specific instructions into cells, programming them to do what we want.

Much like a classic Turing computer system, cells have the capacity to process and respond to instructions and codes inputted into their main system, argues Professor Jaramillo.

Similar to software running on a computer, or apps on a mobile device, many different RNA sequences could be created to empower cells with a ‘Virtual Machine’, able to interpret a universal RNA language, and to perform specific actions to address different diseases or problems.

This will allow a novel type of personalised and efficient healthcare, allowing us to ‘download’ a sequence of actions into cells, instructing them to execute complex decisions encoded in the RNA.

The researchers made their invention by first modelling all possible RNA sequence interactions on a computer, and then constructing the DNA encoding the optimal RNA designs, to be validated on bacteria cells in the laboratory.

After inducing the bacterial cells to produce the genetically engineered RNA sequences, the researchers observed that they had altered the gene expression of the cells according to the RNA program — demonstrating that cells can be programmed with pre-defined RNA commands, in the manner of a computer’s microprocessor.

Professor Alfonso Jaramillo, who is part of the Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre, commented:

“The capabilities of RNA molecules to interact in a predictable manner, and with alternative conformations, has allowed us to engineer networks of molecular switches that could be made to process arbitrary orders encoded in RNA.

“Throughout the last year, my group has been developing methodologies to enable RNA sensing the environment, perform arithmetic computations and control gene expression without relying on proteins, which makes the system universal across all living kingdoms.

“The cells could read the RNA ‘software’ to perform the encoded tasks, which could make the cells detect abnormal states, infections, or trigger developmental programs.”