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The good old days... when viruses merely displayed a funny message or erased your hard disk, but didn't turn your computer into part of a botnet controlled by o
by Kristine1975 11y ago
The good old days... when viruses merely displayed a funny message or erased your hard disk, but didn't turn your computer into part of a botnet controlled by organized crime.
- eric-hu 11y agoThere was an insidious period when viruses would attempt to flash the bios with garbage, rendering the computer useless. I heard that some crafty individuals would recover by purchasing a motherboard of the same model, swapping the bios chip to boot up, hot swapping the old chip back and then reflashing the old chip with a good bios. After that, you could also reinstall the new bios chip in the motherboard and return it, slightly used. I'll take a botnet computer over a bricked one any day.
- kosma 11y agoI'll take a trashed BIOS over a backdoored BIOS any day. Firmware viruses are a very real threat today.
- nickysielicki 11y agoIf anyone feels like researching this, don't look at the BadBios conspiracy, that's an internet meme. Instead look at things like Intel's trusted computing. Igor Skochinsky (of fame from Hexrays / IDA, and moderator on /r/reverseengineering) has an excellent powerpoint highlighting some research on their Management Engine, which is probably in your computer right now. pdf: https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5BBreakpoint%5D%20Intel%20ME%20-%20Two%20Years%20Later.pdf https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5...
- hartpuff 11y agoA bricked computer isn't as likely to empty your bank account though.
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm imagining the iFixit instructions for this on an iMac.
- yuhong 11y agoI think many of the UEFI variable bugs that brick systems can be easily exploited from Windows even today.
- kowdermeister 11y agoI'd rather suck in a botnet virus DDOS-ing some random site over losing my data.
- schoen 11y agoOr weren't written by a government as part of a multi-million-dollar malware R&D program that reduces to practice way-out-there speculations about what malicious software could theoretically do.
- kevincox 11y agoThis is a fantastic, numerous talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2g9lgYrYJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2g9lgYrYJM
- lvs 11y agoOr worse! http://i.stack.imgur.com/qsMM2.jpg http://i.stack.imgur.com/qsMM2.jpg
- azraomega 11y agoLMAO! Good old days, need that paper to frame it!