3 ms·

If an attacker is sitting at the machine, they already have full control of the system. They can easily pull the hard drive, image it, or do any number of thing

• jstimpfle 11y ago
  > If an attacker is sitting at the machine, they already have full control of the system. The bootloader isn't going to stop this kind of attack in the slightest. You can have physical protection, like locks. And you can disable boot sources. So of course this password protection can make attacks much more difficult.
• detaro 11y ago
  Remote console access also exists outside of virtual environments. Yes, getting it means the attackers already got somewhere they shouldn't, but it isn't necessarily easy to exploit outside of DoS-attacks.
• dspillett 11y ago
  > If an attacker is sitting at the machine, they already have full control of the system. You don't have to be physically in front of the machine to access the bootloader. You could be controlling a physical machine via KVMoIP and/or as you mention it could be a virtual machine to which you similarly have pre-boot control. In both cases it would take at least one other exploit to get into the position where you could consider using this one, and maybe that exploit gives you full access anyway, but even though it is unlikely that this is going to be actually useful to attackers it is possible this it could play a role in a chain of exploits culminating in an effective attack.