Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday March 23, @09:37AM

from the can't-believe-it-took-this-long dept.

suraj.sun writes"A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform unveil 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 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."