GRC SecurAble: Determine Processor Security Features

GRC SecurAble: Determine Processor Security Features

For MS Windows users.

As reported on the Security Now podcast focusing on hardware data execution prevention (DEP), GRC has released a tool to determine if an Intel or AMD processor supports DEP, 64 bit instruction or visualization. The GRC site does a very good job explaining why these may be important to your machine. Suffice to say that if you are able to enable DEP on your machine it will protect your machine from the exploit that most malware uses to gain control over your computer.

In order to be in effect DEP must be enabled on the hardware and in the operating system. SecurAble will tell you if DEP is available on your machine. Then next steps are to make sure the BIOS does not disable it on boot, and the OS uses the capability. I will caution you that unless you really understand this material you should not just enable DEP. If any of your hardware drivers or critical software do not meet DEP constraints Windows may fail to boot. What is needed is a tool that will assist the average user to configure DEP in a way that will allow them to detect and work around any such issues. Happily, GRC is working on that tool now. More on this when it is released.