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New 'Phlashing' Attack Sabotages Hardware

Posted by timothy on from the not-so-nice dept.

yahoi writes "A new type of denial-of-service attack, called permanent denial-of-service (PDOS), damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. A researcher has discovered how to abuse firmware update mechanisms with what he calls 'phlashing' — a type of remote PDOS attack."

3 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. New word overloading by will_die · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    You know it is getting bad when you create a stupid word like phlashing and it is already being used to indicate "Flash-based phishing sites".

    For those wondering why you would need to seperate types of phishing sites, according to Netcraft(and yes Netcraft said they are increasing)

    Attackers have begun using Flash animation to create spoof sites as a strategy to defeat automated anti-phishing services, which scan the text of a page in search of suspect phrases (brands of financial institutions, for example) that may identify it as a phishing scam. Phishers previously shifted from HTML to Javascript to make it harder to analyze a page's source code, and the use of Flash represents the next step in this evolution.
    1. Re:New word overloading by rumith · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Hey. You and the GP are sort of off-topic. Could you at least read the damn summary please? The story has nothing to do with Adobe Flash, it's about modifying firmware thus causing obvious discomfort to the victim.

    2. Re:New word overloading by maxume · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Please don't be the topic police. You and I are contributing even less to the thread than they did.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.