Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes

suraj.sun writes "A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe. Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week's CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player."

Comments

Of course.

[ers81239]

Last I checked, the BIOS lives in a chip, not the HDD. Thus the magic diskless booting. How is this news?

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[Jurily]

Well, I don't give a shit about either. What's your take on OpenBIOS?

Re:Requires root privileges or physical access

[tickleboy2]

Mom? Is that you???