The RAM in a lot of gaming PCs can be made to lie about its size - and Windows believes it

Every stick of RAM in your PC carries a tiny chip that tells the motherboard what it is: how big, how fast, which timings to use. Researchers from the University of Birmingham and Durham University have shown that on a lot of consumer memory, that chip can simply be rewritten by software already running on the machine. Their paper - "Download More RAM: Dismantling Windows Operating System Defences with Mischievous Memory" - was presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in Baltimore on August 13.

Tell a PC it has twice the memory it really has and something odd happens: two different addresses end up pointing at the same physical chip. That opens a door into memory Windows and the processor had deliberately walled off. Using it, the team switched off Virtualization-based Security and Hypervisor-Enforced Code Integrity, killed antivirus and the monitoring tools built on top of it, defeated kernel-level anti-cheat, and turned hundreds of blocklisted drivers - including ones previously seen in ransomware - back on.

The uncomfortable part is who can do this. Attacks on memory modules used to require opening the case. As the researchers put it: "This one just needs a script. That changes who can carry it out and how far it can spread." Modules from Corsair, G.Skill and ADATA were found with no write protection on that config chip - by the team's estimate roughly 55% of high-performance consumer memory and 70% of the gaming segment. Crucial, Kingston, HyperX and some G.Skill lines were partly protected.

Before anyone panics: the attacker needs administrator rights on your PC first, so no web page is doing this to you. Microsoft tracks it as CVE-2026-23670 and shipped mitigations in the April 2026 updates, and having Secure Boot switched on blocks the attack in the form demonstrated. Corsair's iCue can enable write protection after the fact, and HWiNFO can do it for other brands.

Tendvane's security-posture check tells you plainly whether Secure Boot and BitLocker are actually switched on - the same two settings that keep turning out to matter in stories like this one.